


The Year of the Rapture

by shinealightonme



Category: Leverage
Genre: Apocalypse, Gen, Road Trips, Superpowers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-08
Updated: 2013-03-24
Packaged: 2017-12-04 11:26:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 48,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/710279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinealightonme/pseuds/shinealightonme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When half the world's population suddenly develops superpowers, civilization as we know it collapses. Eliot just wants to keep Parker alive, but the apocalypse is one damn thing after another.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. April

**Author's Note:**

> Written for apocalypsebang on livejournal; inspired by a prompt from apocalyptothon 2011. Characterization and a few minor plot points set this as being circa the second season of the show, but canon compliance is largely render moot by the part where the world ends and people have superpowers.
> 
> Artwork by firefly1344 is [here](http://firefly1344.livejournal.com/35355.html).

"Let's go steal ourselves a Loch Ness monster," Nate had said.

There was a real chance those would be the last words Nate ever said to him, and Eliot couldn't get over how _stupid_ they were.


	2. May

It took them a couple weeks to get back to Boston after the job went south, and the whole damn world went with it. At first Eliot stole a car, but the roads were shit and he kept promising himself that once Parker could handle it, they'd walk.

He wouldn't have minded walking so much except that made it harder to avoid other people. And Eliot quickly decided that avoiding other people was top priority during the apocalypse.

Half the people they met were afraid of them. The violent ones, Eliot could handle. It was the other ones that bothered him. The families and the crying kids and the desperate, lonely people begging Eliot not to hurt them; they kept him up at nights.

The other half the people were the ones everyone was scared of.

The first week – when Parker was still unconscious a lot, and all he knew was that buildings were exploding and streets were melting and there were tornadoes where tornadoes had no business being – that was an education.

The first changed person Eliot met was halfway through looting a grocery store, and didn't like having competition, or so Eliot gathered from the fact that he threw a lightning bolt in Eliot's face.

After Eliot had thoroughly pummeled the guy, he checked him all over for tasers, wiring, even a goddamn static-electricity balloon, anything that would explain how he'd managed to call up lightning on a cloudless day. Inside a building. There was no explanation, except that the guy kept giggling and saying he had a gift.

Eliot met the second changed person the next day, when a giant tree growing in the middle of the road forced him to pull over. He was mildly curious about how the thing had gotten where it was – it was growing up through the asphalt, pushing it aside like it was tissue paper, and he'd seen sidewalks bumpy with tree roots, but this was ridiculous. He was more curious about how he'd get around it without wrecking the car.

"Stupid, isn't it," someone said from behind him. Eliot whirled around to find a girl, twelve or thirteen at the most, looking at the tree. She was tiny, alone, and barefoot, which seemed like a horrible combination under the circumstances.

"What is?" he asked, not sure if the answer was going to be him.

"The trees," she said, in the condescending tone natural to all teenagers. "You get rid of one, like three more pop up. It's all Kevin's fault, he thinks they're so cool, never mind that there's a reason people don't have trees in the middle of buildings."

"He dug up the road?" Maybe this kid could be tracked down and made to undo it.

"The tree did. He just put it there, it did the rest. I think he just does it 'cause he got a crappy power and he's trying to make it seem cool."

The conversation had suddenly veered off into unfamiliar terrain. Eliot stumbled a bit trying to piece together a map. "He has a – power, to make trees grow."

"Yup," the girl replied. "Mine's way cooler." And without any hesitation about walking across a ruined road barefoot, she walked up to the tree, touched it, and –

– and before Eliot could blink, he was dodging shrapnel.

Eliot poked his head back over the hood of the car. The tree was gone, just a crater left where it had stood. And the girl, who was smiling like the kind of person that smiles when they explode things, what are they called again, oh right, _psychopaths._

A lot of things started making more sense, though a stubborn part of Eliot's mind tried to resist. The lightning bolt to the face. The massive property damage that had put a halt to their last job and cut them off from the rest of the team. The evacuated cities. The utter lack of official response teams.

The government had contingency plans for terrorist attacks and contagious diseases and natural disasters. They didn't have any plans for an outbreak of superpowers.

He got back in the car and drove away without another word to the little girl. If he thought of her again, it was to feel a little sorry for any crook who thought she'd be an easy target.

-

At first Parker slept a lot, which seemed like an understandable reaction to the near death experience she'd had. Eliot wasn't exactly sure, then, what had happened to her, but it had hurt, and her body was helping her recover, or so he figured.

But the first days of her return to the living, waking world, she was so far removed from the Parker that he knew that Eliot started to wonder, really wonder, if something more had happened to her than her body was able to fix.

Eliot knew about medicine, enough to stitch up a guy's wound so he wouldn't bleed to death before he could get real help, enough to stitch up his own wounds, even, but he didn't know a damn thing about brains except how to check for concussions, which Parker didn't have.

Which would have been reassuring if Parker had said a single damn thing to him since the world ended.

Eliot wasn't a chatty guy, but even he found it a little off-putting how silent Parker was.

"You feeling all right?" Eliot asked Parker.

Parker looked out the window, same as she'd done the last ten miles, and the ten miles before that. It would've been less eerie if there'd been some music or something. But the radio stations were all haywire, and the ones that worked were broadcasting outdated bullshit warnings, never mind that that horse was several county lines away from that barn door by now.

"Hungry?" he tried asking an hour later.

Parker didn't say anything, but she took the jerky he passed her and ate it in quick, efficient bites. That was same as usual for Parker, anyway. Not letting the food get a chance to get away, even if it meant not appreciating the flavor.

Of course, there wasn't much flavor to appreciate in gas station beef jerky, and it was the same thing they'd had three days running.

Another hour, and Eliot thought he'd have another try at starting a conversation – might as well mention the weather, which was not quite as boring a topic these days as it once was – but he looked over at Parker and found she'd shut her eyes. He almost thought she was asleep for a moment, but her breathing was all wrong and there was a bit too much tension in her shoulders.

She was faking being asleep.

Fine, he could take a hint, and he'd never been one to pester a woman who wasn't interested in paying him any mind.

Eliot didn't think about what he'd do if Parker kept ignoring him.

-

They found a rundown motel right around sunset, so Eliot pulled over. After a second's consideration, he revved the engine and took the car up over the curb, gritting his teeth as the bottom of the car scraped along the cement.

Parker jumped a bit and looked at him. She wasn't too happy about it, but hell, at least she was looking.

"Was that really necessary?" she asked.

"Sure was," Eliot said, guiding the car between two of the motel's buildings. "Gotta park the car somewhere out of sight."

"No one's going to steal it," Parker said.

"Aren't you the one who squirrels all your shiny treasures off in hidey-holes?" Eliot asked. "Thought you were more paranoid than that."

Parker frowned. "There isn't anyone around to steal it."

Because everyone was dead. Great, she'd found some way of being even more paranoid than her usual self, and it was rubbing off on him. Eliot threw the car into park. "Come on, we gotta search the place," Eliot said. "Sooner we know it's clear the sooner we can lie down."

"It is clear," Parker said.

Eliot could have argued that they'd managed to make it here, after all, so it couldn't have been impossible for anyone else, especially not if the anyone else's in question had a boost that could help them out.

He didn't, and just let Parker lead the way into the motel.

They rummaged around behind the counter until they found keys to a couple rooms. Too bad the damn things were magnetic strips on cards, instead of actual freaking keys you could put into an actual freaking lock. Hardison could have straightened the whole thing out, but of course, they didn't have Hardison.

Parker inhaled quickly and jumped straight up like she'd heard something, or been shocked.

"Something wrong?" Eliot asked.

"You know there is," Parker glared at him.

So this was all Parker's being mad at him? He tried not to blame her, because it's not like she was so good about emotions before the whole world blew up in their faces, but he hadn't done anything except take care of her. It's not like the damn planet was his fault.

Parker smacked the room keys down on the counter and walked past him. "I can get myself into a room," she said.

Eliot let her go. He could secure the motel himself. In the good old days, they could have split up and checked the place out in half the time. Today there was no reason to think she'd do anything now but slow him down.

Eliot ran a hand through his hair, mad at himself. Basic rule of combat: you had to fight the opponents in front of you, not the ones you wanted to fight. Not the ones who were supposed to be there.

-

The next morning was a lot of the same. Parker had cooled down a little bit, maybe forgiving him for whatever it was he'd done to piss her off, but she still wasn't too friendly. 

He could handle unfriendly. He'd handled a lot worse.

The car was untouched, either because Eliot'd hidden it away or because Parker's prediction was true. It didn't make a difference.

Eliot unlocked the car, and whatever else was wrong with her, Parker climbed into the passenger seat without a moment's hesitation.

They'd been driving about five miles before they saw the hitchhiker.

A ragged man on the side of the road waved them down, calm at first but more and more frantically as they showed no signs of slowing down.

Parker shot Eliot a look.

They were getting pretty close to him, now. He didn't have any luggage, but that didn't mean anything; he could have a dozen weapons hidden on him that they couldn't see from so far away, going so fast. And half the people in the world these days didn't need weapons to make trouble.

Hardison would have stopped. Sophie would have stopped.

Nate would have stopped.

Eliot stepped down on the gas pedal.

The hitchhiker waved, bigger and bigger gestures, his mouth moving with unheard yells. He stepped into what was left of the road, trying to force them to stop.

Eliot sped up.

At the last moment, the hitchhiker jumped out of the way. He kept after them, though, chasing the car as it got further and further away, until he finally fell to the side of the road.

"That wasn't very nice," Parker said.

Eliot looked at her out of the side of his eyes. She didn't look like she had a problem with any of it.

"When've I ever been nice?" he replied.

Parker hmmmed and looked out the window again.

Eliot didn't second-guess himself. But he thought, for a moment, about how nice it would've been to have some company, real company. More often than not, he felt like he was travelling alone. That wasn't what he'd signed on for this time.

Parker put her hands up to her eyes and rubbed them, like they hurt, like she was trying to scrub something out of them.

"Eliot, could you just stop talking? You're making my head hurt."

Eliot glanced at her. Everything else he'd taken in stride, but if Parker lost it on top of the rest of it...

"Parker, I ain't said ten words to you all day."

"Yes, you have," Parker said. "You won't stop talking, you said you're lonely and you said I'm a freak and you keep talking about Hardison and Sophie and Nate and I want you to stop doing that."

Eliot slowed the car, with a glance in the rearview mirror to check the hitchhiker wasn't still following them. "Parker. I didn't say any of that."

"Stop lying to me," Parker said, and there were little tears filling up in the corners of her eyes from exhaustion or frustration or both. "Stop it, stop it, stop talking," and she threw her hands over her ears.

Eliot breathed deep against the impulse to shout something. His mind whirled away, thinking about how Parker had lost consciousness that same day that half the world developed superpowers; thinking about how Parker had been ignoring him; thinking about how Parker got mad at him when he thought about the others, or thought how she was freaking him out.

Eliot thought a lot of things, and then he thought, _well, shit._

And then he stopped thinking.

He'd learned, through a lot of training, how to turn his brain off. It was easier in the middle of a fight, when everything was act-react-anticipate and his body was doing most of the work, but he'd tried his hand at meditation and Zen and being one with the universe and all that, and turned his brain off.

Parker very slowly lowered her hands, relaxing into her seat in a way that she hadn't in days, and exhaled shakily.

Eliot very carefully let one thought cross his mind. _Parker._

Parker looked at him.

Eliot very carefully did not think _fuck._

_Parker, look at my lips._

Parker lowered her gaze slightly.

_You notice anything?_

"How are you doing that?" Parker asked.

"Parker," Eliot spoke out loud, because some shit was just too freaky to be tolerated for too long. "Parker, I haven't been talking. I've been thinking. That's what you've been hearing."

Parker stared at him, face completely blank, for one long moment, so that Eliot thought she was going to argue with him or disagree or just refuse to accept it.

Instead, she threw open the door, rolled out onto the road, and ran off at top speed.

Eliot swore, in his mind and out loud, before throwing the car in park. He was fast, but Parker was faster and she had the lead. He ran after, not thinking for both their sakes, just feet pounding the ground as hard and fast as possible.

Parker left the main road and headed into the trees around them. Eliot was losing momentum dodging, not to mention getting smacked in the face and body with branches. He kept losing sight of her, just seeing little glimpses through the foliage.

"Parker!" he tried to yell, best as he could between breaths. It came out like a wheeze. Where the hell did she think she was going to go, anyway? And what would happen if they didn't all get back to Boston?

Eliot slowed for a split second, struck by a sudden thought. It wasn't a very nice thought, but it'd probably work. And when had he ever been nice?

Inside his own mind he hollered _NATE. SOPHIE._

One of the glimpses of Parker slowed.

_HARDISON. OUR CREW. BACK TOGETHER. NATE SOPHIE HARDISON –_

Parker cried out and fell, best as Eliot could tell, through a bunch of underbrush.

She'd extracted herself by the time that he caught up with her, was back on her feet and off to run again, but Eliot tackled her down to the ground.

"Ow!" Parker shouted. "Get off me!" 

"Not yet," Eliot said. She was punching at his arms and chest, but it wasn't anything he couldn't handle, and he let it be. She could hurt him much worse if she really wanted to. "Promise you won't run off."

"No! Go away!"

"You really want that?" Eliot asked. "You really want to be out here on your own?" 

"I've done it before," Parker said.

"Not like this, Parker. No one's done anything like this before."

Parker still looked mulish, but she'd stopped hitting him.

"You going to play nice if I let you up?"

It was a long moment before Parker nodded.

Eliot got up and offered her a hand, but she pushed herself up and took several steps away from him.

"You going to be okay now?" Eliot asked.

Parker crossed her arms. "I'll be okay when it stops."

Eliot'd been afraid of something like that. "I don't know when it's going to stop. I don't know if it'll stop at all."

"Don't say that," Parker said. "It has to stop. I want it to go away."

"Parker," Eliot sighed.

"They're your thoughts," Parker continued. "Can't you control them at all?"

"I don't think this is me," Eliot said. "People all over have been starting to do all kinds of crazy shit. Blowing things up, lightning bolts...it all started that day you passed out. This is all on your end."

"So it's my fault?" she asked, voice cracking. "Parker's even crazier than before, who knew she had it in her?"

So this was Parker with insight. Great.

"Knock it off," Eliot growled. "That isn't what I meant. I'm just saying there's a lot of weird shit going on and it's not a matter of you or me being able to stop anything. You just gotta live with it."

Parker kept her gaze on the ground.

"Can't you just...stop thinking so much?" she asked.

"I can't turn my brain off all the time," Eliot said. "This is one fucked up world we're in now, I need to use everything I got."

Parker looked at him for the briefest of seconds before looking away, like he hurt her eyes.

"Come with me," Eliot said. "We'll keep going, we'll get to Boston, we'll figure things out from there."

"I can't," Parker said slowly. "Not if you're going to be thinking about them all the time."

"Okay," Eliot replied. "No thinking, no talking about any of it. We just get to Boston and wait. Good enough?"

"Yeah," Parker nodded, clutching her arms. "Yeah, that's good enough."

Eliot nodded, very solemnly, and said goodbye, really goodbye, to life before the apocalypse. "All right, then."


	3. June

They hit the Eastern Seaboard around about the time Eliot completely gave up on the hijacked car.

It'd had its uses, especially when Parker wasn't feeling so great – he'd be damned if he'd carry a damsel in distress across several state lines, never mind that Parker was hardly a damsel – but by that point, a solid month after the world started to end, the damn thing was worse than useless. Eliot was having to baby it across so many busted roads and washed out paths that it was easier to just grab the most essential items in their packs – a lot of knives, mostly, and some food – and set off on foot.

Parker complained about this, greatly, which ticked off Eliot to no end because it wasn't like she wasn't a fan of physical exertion. He couldn't figure if this was some desire on her part to get to Boston as soon as possible, or if she felt like they were compromising their safety, or if it were some greater doubt about his ability to lead them.

"Ugh, I'm not going to overthrow you," Parker rolled her eyes. Eliot was still getting used to the way that she would respond to things he hadn't said. "Then I would be in charge, and that would be gross."

"You'd only be in charge of yourself," Eliot pointed out. "There's only two of us, and if you mutiny, I'm not sticking around."

"Well, exactly," Parker said. "Then I would have to cook. Yuck. Aren't there laws against cooking squirrels?"

"That wasn't a squirrel, Parker," Eliot growled. "It was a rabbit. Can't you even tell the difference?"

Parker waved away the question. "Fur, rodent, creepy little twitchy noses. More importantly, if we don't have the car, we have to _walk_ the rest of the way."

So there it was. End of the world, and Parker was being _lazy._

Despite being on foot and occasionally wanting to murder each other, Eliot and Parker reached Richmond by early June.

Eliot had been there before a couple of times for different jobs, and while you don't see the best of a town when you're there to beat the living shit out of someone, it was still pretty clear that these were hard times. They didn't pass a single building that had all its parts where they ought to be. And after two solid hours they hadn't passed a single human being. While they walked through suburbs Eliot tried to envision on a map, heading toward what he was pretty sure was downtown Richmond.

Eliot wasn't one for getting spooked. But the fact of the matter was that it was just damn creepy.

Parker caught his eye, and he knew that she was on just as high an alert as he was. Some things didn't need superpowers to be communicated.

-

That night was an uneventful one.

They holed up in someone's house, long abandoned from the look of it. Eliot had never been too shy about other people's personal space before, and Parker had stripped half-naked in front of him the first time they'd ever met, so he knew she didn't care too much about it.

In fact, Parker was weirdly into exploring the personal details that had been left behind. There were empty spaces on the bookshelf, empty hooks hanging on the walls, that indicated that the people who'd lived here had taken their photos and most portable memories with them, but there were other things.

Things like:

"Oh, look," Parker said, mouth full of day-old, cold squirrel meat, which Eliot had done his best with, but which Parker had still slathered with barbeque sauce she'd found in the mostly-empty pantry. "They had a baby."

Eliot left off with his examination of the master bedroom (nothing useful; lots of clothes, toiletries, crap like that) to follow her voice into the next bedroom.

Sure enough, it had a crib in it, and a mobile hanging over the crib.

Eliot wondered if the baby had developed powers. What exactly did you do with a super powered baby, especially if you didn't have superpowers to help you deal with it?

You leave the baby behind, part of him whispered.

Parker raised an eyebrow at him. "Even a super-baby can't fend for itself," she pointed out.

Eliot stopped himself thinking 'get out of my head.' Parker couldn't help herself. "I'm sure they didn't abandon the baby," Eliot growled. "We'd've found it."

Parker laughed, spitting squirrel-sandwich over the floor. Eliot wrinkled a nose at her.

"God, Parker, you ever heard of table manners?" he asked.

"Yeah," she said, talking with her mouth full. "Didn't see the point. But wouldn't that be funny?"

"Abandoned babies?"

"No, no," Parker waved a hand between the two of them, and started laughing again.

Eliot waited for her to explain herself.

"Wouldn't what be funny?" he demanded. He wanted to get back to locking down the house. He was tired.

"Oh," Parker said. "Didn't I say?"

Eliot rubbed his forehead. "No, Parker, you didn't."

Parker stopped laughing. "I thought I said."

"So?" Eliot asked.

Parker stared at him.

Eliot was suddenly more than tired, was in fact exhausted. "Parker, use your damn words!"

"I'm trying," she told him, before dropping her sandwich and hurrying out of the nursery, pushing gracelessly past him.

Eliot sighed.

Then he walked to the window and checked that the latch seemed sturdy. There was no use in running after Parker now. It could wait. They were living their whole lives now waiting for something, there was no need to hurry this.

-

Parker did that ghost thing that creeped Eliot out all the time, no matter how many times he'd seen it, where she vanished from sight and reappeared hours later without any comment.

This time, she didn't reappear until early morning, when he woke up to find her hovering over him.

"Parker," he said, opening one eye a crack. "I only let people climb over me in bed in very specific circumstances, and I don't think that's what either of us has in mind, so get off."

"The baby," Parker told him, not moving from her perch on his hips.

"What?" Eliot asked. He was pretty quick to regain his consciousness, but Parker straddling him in the pre-dawn light and talking about babies was doing strange things to his thinking process.

"That's what was so funny," Parker told him. "If they'd left the baby behind and we'd have found it. It would have been funny if we had a baby."

Okay, he could see where that was worth a chuckle, if it wasn't totally terrifying at the same time. A kid could maybe survive him for a father or Parker for a mother – maybe – but not both. "And what wasn't funny?" he asked, since that seemed the more important unsettled issue from last night.

Parker rolled off him.

"So now you get off," Eliot said. The damage was done, he was awake. "Fine, we'll get an early start. Ain't much good hanging around here, anyway."

He headed into the bathroom – the running water in this house had been the main incentive to spend the night here – and was starting to take care of business when Parker poked her head in.

At this point he couldn't even yell at Parker about giving him privacy because it felt like they hadn't had any privacy between them since, at the very latest, the week before, when she'd woken him to tell him that the dream he'd been having about Amy and the stables was too loud. At the earliest – hell, they'd never had any privacy between them.

"I thought I told you about the baby," she said.

"You just did," Eliot said.

"No, last night. I thought I told you about the baby, but I didn't. I just thought it."

Eliot wanted to run a hand through his hair but his hands were kind of occupied at the moment. "Just because you hear what I think doesn't mean I hear what you think," he told her.

"I know that," Parker huffed, then stormed off.

"You could at least shut the door!" Eliot told her.

"I've already seen your penis," she called back. "And it's not very impressive!"

Eliot finished his business with the toilet and washed his hands.

"She's just saying that 'cause she's grumpy," he told himself, before realizing that his _own_ boundaries of what was spoken and what was thought and what was never, ever even thought were starting to get a little blurred.

-

Their progress after leaving the house was a lot slower than Eliot was really happy with, and he was even less happy about the reason why.

The roads had melted.

Not just the roads – the sidewalks, dirt paths, even stepping-stones in people's front yards. Solid surfaces all around them had been crushed down to gravel as fine as sand. Everywhere Eliot stepped was like walking on a beach.

The exception was the grass on people's lawns, but it was summer in the South and sprinklers weren't working, so grass was hard to find. This left him and Parker slogging their way through the city, working up a sweat just trying to walk without their feet being sucked into the sand.

"Who'd even do something like this?" Eliot growled at Parker.

"Someone trying to set up a trap?" Parker asked.

Eliot glared at her. That comment wasn't doing any wonders for his mood.

"Or someone who doesn't know what they're doing," Parker said. "It isn't like you haven't thought about how out of control all of these powers are."

"Yeah, well," Eliot stopped to pull his hair back, to keep it from sticking to the sweat on his face. "Figure the out of control powers can't be as bad as the powers that are under control."

They were halfway out of town when it happened. Parker knew about it before Eliot did. She stopped, tilted her head, and looked alarmed.

"What is – " Eliot asked.

"Shh!" Parker waved a hand at him.

Eliot fell silent, wondering what Parker was doing.

"I said SHH," Parker glared at him.

Eliot swore once before trying to clear his mind.

Parker's eyes moved from Eliot to a point over his shoulder. "Someone's in trouble," Parker said.

"So?" Eliot asked, trying to keep his words and his thoughts short.

"Do we help people in trouble?" Parker asked him. "Or don't we?"

There wasn't much of a chance for Eliot to consider the question. Parker had a sense of urgency in his voice that said this was a time-sensitive matter, and he was still trying not to think too much. His answer came mostly from instinct.

"Where are they?"

Parker pointed and led the way, running as best she could in the sand-like streets.

Eliot followed.

It was a few minutes' hard slog before Eliot could hear the trouble. It disturbed him, a little, to think that Parker had heard this with her mind from so far away.

And then he didn't have time to worry about Parker, because he was in the thick of things, soreness in his muscles and tightness in his lungs forgotten at the sound of a child screaming.

With a last burst of speed, he was able to push his way through the morass sucking at his feet, jump over a fence, and round a building.

He took a second to slow down, but didn't come to a complete stop; he didn't want to lose his momentum, just wanted a chance to understand the situation he was running into.

The situation didn't look good, but it took him a second longer than he'd've liked to realize why. There were a couple kids crying, which was always a bad sign, and there were some distressed men and women who could have been the parents of the crying kids, but it took a few seconds more to realize why anyone why crying, why anyone was distressed.

It's not like he traveled in the best of crowds before all this, but at least in his line of work, when someone was hurting someone else, you could tell.

The whole thing came to a point with a child – three or four, androgynous in long hair and green overalls – who was standing perfectly still in the middle of the road.

Lacking anything else to pinpoint as a problem, Eliot focused on the kid. Kids didn't stand still, at all, but especially not when everyone around them was freaking out and crying. This kid should have been crying, too.

He pumped his legs faster, came back up to speed, not knowing what he was supposed to do except knowing something was _wrong_ and he had to get to this kid.

"ELIOT!" Parker bellowed. "STOP!"

And there was one other thing he knew.

Whatever was wrong with Parker – whatever crap she said about his penis, whatever personal boundaries she didn't have, whatever insanity she was going through with her mind-reading – if she told him to stop, he would stop.

The soft surface underfoot was actually a blessing here, letting him drop his speed much faster than he'd have been able to on cement. Eliot screeched to a halt a few feet away from the kid in front of him, startling kids and grown-ups alike who had no idea where he'd come from.

Surprise bought him a few seconds of grace from the strangers around him, a buffer while they decided if he was a danger they had to do something about. Those seconds were enough to notice what was wrong with the kid in front of him.

It was _pale_. Not just pale; translucent. Eliot could see the lines on the street behind it – only very faintly, but he shouldn't have been able to see them at all.

Parker caught up with him, breathing hard, and grabbed onto his elbow. "Don't touch it," she warned him. "That would be a bad thing."

"What the hell happened?" Eliot asked.

His grace period had worn off. One of the men standing around the child, who was holding a baby with a pink bow on its head, held out his free hand toward Parker and Eliot. The hand shook. "Step back," he croaked. "Or else."

"Else what?" Eliot asked.

"He could hurt you," Parker said, then frowned. "But he probably couldn't."

"Yeah, most people couldn't hurt me," Eliot told her.

"No, I mean, he's one of," Parker waved her hands vaguely, and while Eliot got what she meant, he had no idea what context she was putting it in. He was one of the powerful? He was one of the fucked up? He was one of them? He was one of us? "But he can't control it very well."

"I don't care if he can shoot lasers out his ass," Eliot told Parker, than locked eyes with the man, who had a very familiar look in his eyes. It was the look of a man pushed beyond his limits. This guy could be very, very dangerous, but only unintentionally. "I'm not here to hurt the kid," Eliot told him. "We heard something going on."

The guy licked his lips. "Jamie just – froze," he said. "Why did he – you did something."

"No, I really didn't," Eliot said. "We're just passing by."

The guy looked over at the other adults he was traveling with, who'd mostly huddled together to form a wall to protect the rest of the children. Whether that wall was supposed to protect the kids from Eliot, or frozen Jamie, or the man with the baby, Eliot had no idea.

"No one passes by here," the guy said. "Not since they took it over."

"They who?" Eliot asked.

Parker grabbed his arm and pointed.

At first he thought she'd forgotten she needed to actually say words, again, but then he realized that she really, really didn't need to.

A woman appeared in front of Jamie – just appeared, out of the air, between one moment and the next. Or that wasn't quite right – that was what Eliot's eyes were trying to tell him, because they didn't like what they'd seen. But Eliot was used to beating his body to his will, and he knew, after a moment's honest introspection, that there had been a split second of transition as the woman went from fully translucent to fully opaque, like a chameleon. Like a ghost.

"Eliot," Parker whispered. "This is not a nice woman."

Because he'd needed someone to tell him that. Because it wasn't like he could see for himself how she was looking at the frozen child, like it was a piece of meat.

"Back off," the woman said.

"Why don't you step off, first?" Eliot asked her. "You see, I'm not a big fan of people telling me what to do."

The woman look at him in a way that sent shivers up Eliot's spine.

On the plus side, if she was looking at him, she wasn't looking at Jamie or the baby or any of the rest of them.

"Don't let her touch you," Parker told him.

"I can fight her," Eliot shot back.

"No," Parker said. "Don't even let her _touch_ you."

Eliot shrugged quickly, like the urgency in Parker's voice wasn't alarming. "Shouldn't be too hard."

That was when the woman turned translucent again.

Well, shit.

Eliot's had his share of scrapes in the dark, underground, and one very memorable time in a sensory deprivation tank. But this was twice as hard. It was a bright summer's day in Richmond and his eyes wanted to look around him.

It was hard to focus on your hearing when your sight was doing such a great job.

There was a padding sound, coming up quickly from the left, but not so quickly that he couldn't hear it coming and dodge it.

There. The woman was leaving footprints. For the first time in an hour, Eliot was grateful for whatever misguided person had turned the ground around them into sand.

Except pretty much the second he figured that out, and dodged, the footsteps stopped appearing.

Jamie was standing in the middle of someone's front lawn, grown over with crab grass that gave nothing away.

"Shit," Eliot said, trying to listen, but the kids behind him were sniffling, the adults were trying to use the distraction to get away, but Jamie's dad with the baby was having none of it – why couldn't they stop _arguing_ so loudly – why did it have to be so bright – 

Something attacked him from behind.

Eliot almost committed murder before he realized what had happened. Parker had jumped him from behind, legs around his waist like he was giving piggyback rides at a damn sleepover party, and had her arms tangling their way around his neck.

He gave a second thought, then a third, to the whole "committing murder" idea before asking, "What the hell are you doing?"

"Helping you," Parker said. Her tiny, quick hands covered his eyes. "There, now you can't see."

"Thanks a lot," Eliot grumbled. "I could've just closed them, you know. And then I wouldn't be off-balance."

Parker jerked his head to the right, like he was a horse being broken to the rein. "That way!"

Because Eliot wasn't stupid, he listened to the warning and dodged right before continuing his argument. "Can you hear her?" he asked. "You know, in your way?"

He was still having a hell of a time talking about 'telepathy' out loud.

"Not specific words," Parker said. "She's gone kind of feral. But I can sense her. Can't you?"

"No, Parker, I can't," Eliot snapped.

Parker elbowed him forward, and Eliot reluctantly obliged.

"Funny," Parker said. "She hates you so much I thought even you'd be able to feel it." 

"Not helpful, Parker," Eliot told her.

"I'm just – "

"Quiet," Eliot growled, because if she was going to be blinding him, he ought to at least be listening.

He heard the faintest of rustles from behind him, in time to duck low, below the arms that were reaching for him.

The invisible woman tripped over him, banging her legs not only on him, but on Parker, as well, or so he judged from the "oof" that escaped Parker.

"We okay?" he asked the woman on his back.

"Not dead yet," Parker reported back.

He thought about asking aloud, but didn't want to give anything away to the woman trying to catch them. So, much as he hated it, he gritted his teeth and thought, loudly _What's our endgame here, Parker?_

Of course, the problem with this form of communication was that it was strictly one way.

Parker squeezed his torso more tightly between her legs, just for a second, in a way that he figured was supposed to be comforting.

Hell, it was all he had. He'd take it.

Eliot heard the woman coming for them from the left, and his instincts told him to dodge right, but just as he tensed his legs to move, Parker pulled his face left, toward their attacker.

His hesitation lasted only a fraction of a second.

What the hell. She was on his back, covering his eyes, fingers practically up his nose at this point. He might as well do what she said.

Eliot moved left.

He could feel the air in front of him move as the woman passed right in front of him.

That's when Parker's foot lashed out from his side and made rough, glancing contact with the invisible woman.

"Kicking? Really?" Eliot demands.

Parker slaps a hand over his mouth.

_If the plan was just to kick her,_ Eliot grumbled, not even sure if he was meaning for Parker to overhear him. Of course, she did hear, if the way she hissed in his ear was any indication.

Then there wasn't much time for them to bicker, out loud or not. The woman was hanging back, but nearby. Thinking.

She already had too many advantages here. Eliot couldn't give her any time to figure out a strategy, too.

Listening carefully, sensing as best he could from the light breeze around him, he figured out roughly where she was standing and charged for her.

Parker had warned him off touching the woman, but they'd both grazed her and as far as Eliot could tell that hadn't ended in disaster yet. 

Eliot believed Parker's warning, but there must have been a reason, and whatever that might be, it seemed like he could chance it.

"Skin," Parker hissed in his ear.

Eliot was a little preoccupied with trying to wrestle with someone he couldn't see while a crazy woman hung off him and shoved her hands all over his face.

From the sound of it, the woman had dodged left. Eliot dodged with her.

"Why couldn't you wear gloves?" Parker demanded.

"It's 100 degrees out," Eliot snapped, before he got what she was saying. Not don't let the woman touch him – don't let the woman touch his bare skin.

"Obviously," Parker whispered. Well, excuse Eliot for being distracted because he was fighting for his life, and also for not having psychic powers, since _that_ was a thing he had control over.

Parker wasn't finished with her diatribe. "You want to end up like that kid?"

And then Eliot had an idea.

"Ooh, that could work," Parker told him, slapping the side of his face gently. "Make that happen."

Of course, now that he had a plan – which was essential – and had Parker on board for it – which really wasn't – the woman had slipped out of his senses again.

"You see her?" Eliot asked Parker, for lack of a better word.

Parker chewed her lip. Eliot didn't have to see to know it; her lip was about three centimeters from his ear and he could hear it, which he really could have happily lived the rest of his life without. "No," Parker said.

"You heard them all from several blocks away," Eliot pointed out. "What's different now?"

"They were upset," Parker said. "They were loud. And they still are, which doesn't make it any easier."

Eliot reached up and pushed Parker's hands from his eyes. "Maybe she's gone," he said. "Any case, I don't need you climbing on my back like a monkey. I need my balance."

"Please, your balance is fine," Parker said, not budging from his back. "I know where I'm – "

There was a horrible, primal sound from behind them. A terrific wail, one that knew no words and no mercy.

The baby.

Parker let out a wail of her own, nearly as terrible, and threw her hands over her ears, chanting "stop it, stop it, stop it."

Eliot couldn't spare her any sympathy. He whirled around – Parker nearly fell off, so with a grimace he grabbed her legs tight – and ran for the man holding the baby.

The man who had been holding the baby; the crying, helpless baby was now floating in the air while its father gaped at it, frozen and useless.

When Eliot looked at the baby, he had a terrible moment's thought that it was starting to become pale.

Eliot lowered his head and charged, like a defensive linesman, like a battering ram, for where the invisible woman must be.

He made contact.

His ears rang with the pain of impact, but not so much that he couldn't hear the woman's gasp, not so much that he couldn't feel her fall back onto the ground.

She dropped the baby as she fell.

Parker caught it, and immediately dropped it again.

Well, lucky the ground was soft.

Eliot picked the child up and shoved it into its father's arms, where it continued to cry, no more quietly than before but less terribly.

"Parker," Eliot growled. He turned his face to look at her. He didn't have much of a view from this angle, but he could see tears leaking out the sides of her face like she didn't even know they were there. "I need your shirt."

Parker looked confused. There really must be too much noise for her if she couldn't tell what he needed it for. But she stripped it off and handed it to him without a moment's hesitation.

Eliot ripped it in half and wrapped each half around his hands. Not perfect, but it would have to do.

With his makeshift gloves, Eliot grabbed for the invisible woman as she tried to crawl away and dragged her toward the frozen child. She left the most satisfying trail behind her in the sand.

Hoping this would work and having absolutely no reason to believe it would, Eliot reached blindly down the woman's arm until he found her hand, then reached out with it to touch the frozen child.

Eliot didn't have a lot of expectations about what would happen when he did this, which was good, because they would have been frustrated.

Nothing happened.

At least not at first.

He waited a few seconds, then a few seconds more, and nearly dropped the woman and gave up except for the fact that she was completely, utterly still in his grasp. She had completely stopped moving, and that had to mean something.

Well, that and Parker slapped his shoulder a half-dozen times saying, "Wait, wait, wait! It's working."

He didn't know exactly what was working until he started to see the outline of the woman in his hands. She was becoming visible again, slowly, like dropping milk into a cup of coffee and watching the whole thing bleed outwards.

"Jamie!" the kid's father cried, running forward to grab the child.

"Stop," Eliot said, holding up one hand to stop the man. He didn't want to risk interfering with whatever was happening here; it was a mystery enough without interrupting the thing halfway through.

But with his prompting, Eliot changed his attention from the invisible woman to the frozen child. The change there was harder to notice. The kid's father must have had even sharper eyes than Eliot, or else he was just highly motivated. Sure enough, the kid was slowly losing his ghostly translucence and rejoining the living world.

That's what Eliot thought, anyway. And sure, the woman and the kid both became fully visible again.

But then they both collapsed.

"Jamie?"

This time Eliot let the man barrel over him to scoop up his fallen child. The connection had been broken anyway, and the woman didn't look like she was going to be a threat to anyone for a while, at least.

"What now?" Parker asked.

"Same as before," Eliot said. "We hit the road."

"I meant for her," Parker asked, nudging the formerly invisible woman with her foot. She didn't move.

"She's out for now," Eliot said. "She won't stop us."

"We can't just leave her to wake up and make more trouble," Parker argued.

"I don't know if you've noticed this, but law and order isn't working the way it used to," Eliot said. "There is no prison to send her to. We can't short her stocks or steal her artwork or do anything to punish her except kill her."

"So are we going to kill her?" Parker asked. Casually, like they were talking about dinner plans. Like there weren't a bunch of impressionable little children around them who were already traumatized.

"No," Eliot said.

"So she gets away with it," Parker said.

"We don't have a lot of options here, Parker."

"We have to have at least one more."

Eliot looked around them. The area they were in didn't look too highly trafficked and they hadn't seen anyone in Richmond all of the day before, but there was no telling for sure. This group had come from somewhere, and so had the asshole that turned the ground into soup.

But it would have to do.

"We leave her here," Eliot said. "Tie her up. Leave her to the elements. It'll slow her down, anyway. She won't come after us again."

Parker didn't smile. And Parker smiled at train wrecks and parking tickets and drunken clowns, she'd smile at any damn thing.

"She'll come after someone."

"Yeah, well, let's just be sure they've got the advantage on her when that happens?"

Parker was reading his mind. Of course she was. And she didn't smile at the ideas Eliot had for how to do that. But she did nod.

"Thank you, thank you so much," one of the women who had been guarding the children ran up to Eliot and threw her arms around his neck. "Whoever you are, thank you, you saved Jamie – "

"It's all right," Eliot said, patting the woman on the back as she did that funny breathing thing some women did before they cried. Sure, he didn't know her and she'd interrupted his planning how best to incapacitate an unconscious woman he'd captured, but that didn't mean he had to brush her off.

Parker's eyes flew open, comically wide, and she backpedaled away from the mess of emotion that was the woman hugging Eliot – as well as the rest of the group, children, men, and women, who were converging on them with thanks and questions and more than a few tears. All of them except Jamie, who was still unconscious, and Jamie's father.

"We're just passing by," Eliot explained to the question that he'd heard several people asking. "We heard the trouble and came to see what we could do."

"We didn't think people still had that sort of Good Samaritan spirit anymore," someone said. Eliot turned to see a squirrelly-looking guy squinting at him like he couldn't see properly – which he probably couldn't. Eliot didn't think there were a lot of optometrists making glasses these days.

"Yeah, well." Crying women he could handle. Half a dozen awed children looking up at him like he was some kind of superhero, not so much. "That's just how my mama raised me."

"What's your name?" one of the kids asked. There were still tear tracks on her face, cutting through smudges of dirt that Eliot guessed had been there for days, but she didn't look upset. Kids bounced back from things so fast it gave him whiplash just watching.

"Eliot."

"Eliot," he heard Parker hiss at him.

Had she really wanted him to lie? What was the point? He turned to express his emotions with a facial gesture and maybe a few hand gestures if the kiddies weren't looking too closely – not that that was necessary for him to express himself to her, but habits were soothing – and realized what she was really getting at.

One of the kids had sidestepped him, walked up to Parker, and glommed onto her leg. Parker tried to shake the kid off her leg, then to leave him behind by walking backwards, but it was no use. The kid just giggled and clung harder.

Parker had a look that Eliot usually saw on her face when gold depreciated in value.

"Whoa, hey now, buddy," Eliot said. "That's my friend Parker, she's kind of shy. Can you do me a big favor and give her a little elbow room there?"

The kid looked thoughtfully at him, but apparently whatever fun was had in doing a favor for a hero was less exciting than clinging to the unwilling blonde, because he turned away again.

"Leslie," one of the older kids came up and, though some kind of black magic only older siblings know, managed to separate the barnacle from Parker's leg. Parker nearly shot up the nearest tree, either out of relief or to keep the kid from changing its mind. "Come here. You gotta be nice to people, especially kickass people."

"Hazel!" someone's mother gasped.

Eliot figured if they were worrying about the kid's language, the crisis must have really passed. They were settling back in, remembering that they were people with lives and children and moral values, and not just herd animals. There was just the woman to deal with – which Eliot would do out of sight of the kids – and the still unconscious Jamie, which he couldn't do anything about.

His work was done.

Hazel's mom came and pulled her and Leslie away, but almost casually, like they were bothering the guests and needed to be tucked into bed, not like they were snatching them up to protect them from harm. She dropped Leslie off with one of the teenagers in the group and had whispered words with some of the other adults. It didn't escape Eliot attention that the teenagers were included in the conversation. Looked like childhood just got shorter. It also didn't escape his attention that they were talking about him and Parker. He thought about asking Parker what they were saying, but decided against it. He'd know soon enough, and they didn't look like a threat. He kept his focus on his captive.

Hazel's mom and two of the other adults came over Parker and Eliot's way.

"Thank you for what you did," Hazel's mom started.

"Don't mention it," Eliot said.

"You aren't staying in Richmond, are you?" she asked.

"Just passing through."

"Good." She wetted her lips nervously. "It hasn't been – stable here, lately."

"You folks got somewhere to go?" Eliot asked.

Hazel's mom looked surprised at the questions. "Zachary's got a place in Vermont. We think..." She didn't need to finish. "You?"

"Trying to make it to Boston," Eliot said.

"We'd love it if you came with us," she said all at once. "We owe you so much, after what you did for us, and we're not sure if we can repay it, but we've got some food, and some supplies." She gestured to the woman on her left, who opened a small knapsack. "It'd be company for the road, if nothing else."

The offer seemed legitimate, and in emphasis, the woman with the knapsack pulled out a flannel shirt and stepped forward to offer it to Parker.

Some company couldn't hurt, though all those helpless children and families would probably just be targets that Eliot had to protect.

Of course, if he didn't protect him, likely no one would.

Eliot looked at Parker to get a read of how she felt.

Parker was giving the woman with the flannel shirt the same skittish horse look that she usually reserved for – well, horses.

"Here," the woman said. "I know it's hot now, but you'll probably need it sooner or later."

She went to drape the shirt over Parker's shoulders.

Parker flinched.

Oh, Eliot didn't like that flinch. That flinch just spelled all kinds of problems for his life. Eliot didn't want his life to have any more problems in it.

The woman with the flannel shirt paused, shirt half-draped over Parker's skin, hands lingering against her shoulders. "Are you okay?"

"Just drop it," Eliot growled at her, then belatedly added, "Miss." There was no need to take his frustrations out on her.

The woman scrambled away from Eliot like he breathed fire.

"What wrong with you now?" Eliot asked Parker, stepping close and speaking under his breath. There was no need to alert the strangers of any weaknesses – not anymore so than they already had. Parker was staring at them all, eyes wild, darting from one person to another without ever coming to a stop. It wasn't a look of someone who felt safe. It wasn't the look of someone stable.

"There's so many of them," she whispered back at him.

"Yeah, well, we dealt with kids before," he told her.

"They touched me," she whined.

"You stabbed a guy with a fork once," Eliot reminded her. "I'd think you could handle a little hugging."

Parker shook her head. "It's so much louder when they touch me."

Looked like a 'feel better' hug was off the table, then.

"What about when they keep their hands to themselves?"

"There's still so many of them."

"You didn't seem to mind. Before."

"She distracted me," Parker looked down at the unconscious woman with something that was almost like fondness.

"So do you need something to distract you?" Eliot asked her. "Or you need to get out of here?"

Parker looked Eliot in the eyes. He had no idea what she was looking for, but she didn't find it. Her eyes kept sliding off his and lingering toward the families behind them, who were starting to mumble amongst themselves. Starting to worry.

"Let's get out of here," Eliot said, walking around Parker.


	4. July

Eliot'd had the idea that things would change when they reached Boston.

Well they'd reached Boston a week ago and the only that that'd changed was the humidity had ratcheted up a few degrees.

They hit up the office, the bar, all the old haunts, and found them all deserted. Eventually they holed up in the offices, which didn't have power or water but had the advantage of being a nice location and easily defensible.

The former was useful for scavenging, though if Eliot'd had his choice he wouldn't have come into a city. There was more in the way of food and water to be had out in the countryside, and fewer chances you'd have to fight someone over it.

The latter was useful when a couple of thugs broke into the place at the crack of dawn.

Eliot was already awake before the door'd finished swinging open, which meant he really got to appreciate the screams of terror and pain that followed shortly after.

It was three against one – Parker was around somewhere, surely – but the three weren't nearly a third as good as Eliot. They were mostly running off aggression and desperation, not any sort of training or conditioning.

Maybe that meant they should be pitied, but fuck, Eliot'd been having a dream about French cuisine and candlelight and a sultry brunette, and he was all out of pity for guys who picked a fight with him.

He'd gotten one of them down to the floor for good and was about to take out the second when Parker dropped _out of nowhere_ , landed on the guy's back, and grabbed him in a chokehold.

Eliot gaped at her. "Where the hell did you come from?"

"Up!" Parker answered. She was a little preoccupied.

"Up – on the ceiling? Were you on the ceiling?" Eliot batted away a few punches from the third thug and looked up to double check, but sure enough, there weren't any kinds of handholds up there. Just smooth plaster. "Is that some new trick of yours?"

"Old trick!" Parker said. "Very old!"

So just usual Parker being weirdness, then, and not anything he had to worry about, or not anything he had to worry about too much.

Eliot turned his attention back to the third man, with every intention of taking him out, but found that the guy had stopped moving. Stopped breathing.

Eliot was out the front door before he could consciously process what was happening. Which had the side effect of surprising Parker for the first time in months.

It had the greater effect of putting him face to face with another five guys. And these ones gave every sign – posture, build, demeanor – of being a lot tougher than the first three.

"Eliot, stop!" Parker yelled, chasing after him.

"Why?" he asked. "Are they toxic, too?"

"No, they're just, they're not, I think they're just here to talk."

"They invaded our home, Parker," Eliot said, and realized for the first time how _mad_ he was. He was _furious_. "What am I supposed to do?"

"You could try saying thank you," one of the newcomers said. "We just finished those guys off for you."

"Not something we had a problem with," Eliot spat.

"Yes, I suppose you can protect your own little cave," the guy continued. He had an earring and a soul patch and Eliot decided to hate him. "But we had nothing to do with them, so you can dial your aggression back just a tad."

" _My_ aggression? That guy in there's not breathing."

"Isn't he? Chad," the guy gestured at one of the men standing behind him. "You can let him go now, he's probably learned his lesson."

Chad nodded, and a second later, the third thug could be heard, gasping and wheezing from inside the apartment, before he stumbled out the door. When he spotted the assembly in front of him, he ran back inside and – if Eliot was hearing correctly – jumped out a window.

"Cute," Eliot said. "You're big show of strength doesn't impress me."

"It's supposed to terrify you."

Eliot crossed his arms and looked his most threatening. "I don't scare easy."

He could have stood, toe to toe, with that jackass for the rest of the day if one of the posse hadn't pointed straight to Parker and said. "Forget the goon – she's the one we want."

No. Eliot wasn't letting anyone 'want' Parker.

Except Parker had a little say in that too, didn't she? "Wait."

"I don't like this," Eliot told her.

"I know," Parker said. "But these guys know something. Or they know someone who knows a _lot_ of things. And I think – I think they really do just want to talk."

"So talk," Eliot said.

"In this rat hole?" his new least favorite person asked. "No. We're just the welcoming committee. You need to see Court."

"Who's Court?"

Parker shrugged. "He's the leader. _Obviously_."

Right, because she was _so astute_ before she had magical powers.

"And what's this Court want to talk about?"

"Isn't it obvious?" the welcoming committee asked. "New world order."

-

The goons led Eliot and Parker through the half-familiar streets of Boston without paying much attention to Eliot.

They did keep trying to strike up conversations with Parker, but that was a dicey proposition at the best of times. She'd chat with them for ten minutes about jewelry appraisal – what passed as small talk, for her – then shut down cold on them when they asked anything normal, like where she was from. And once or twice she'd say something that didn't have anything to do with anything. Eliot didn't know if she was responding to things they were thinking but hadn't said or if that was just her doing small talk.

Eliot was weirdly jealous that Parker was listening to other people's thoughts, and then decided that he really needed to change something about their living situations if that was an actual feeling he'd just had.

He did think, loudly as he could, _don't let them know you can read their minds,_ but didn't have a clue whether she'd heard. Anyway, she wasn't an idiot, so that'd probably occurred to her already. It was just that she couldn't reliably tell what someone had said and what they'd just thought...

"Boston doesn't look too bad," Parker mused. "Half the places we passed getting here looked like crap."

"This ain't exactly Paradise," Eliot said, eyeing a four-story apartment complex they were walking past. Vines ten inches in diameter had climbed up the sides of it, punched holes through the walls, and were well on the way to reducing the building to a pile of rubble.

"Better than Tampa," Parker said.

They hadn't come through Tampa.

"Of course it's better than Tampa," one of the guys snorted. "We've got Court looking after things."

"What've you been seeing?" another guy asked Parker.

"Mostly just ruins," she said. "We were holed up at the start of all this, I didn't see a lot of it go down."

"You'll get your chance," the guy told Parker.

So yeah. They were those kind of douche bags.

They wound up taking Parker and Eliot to City Hall. If there'd been pedestrians on cell phones, honking cars stuck in traffic, and some food carts parked outside, Eliot almost could have mistaken it for a year ago. Parker did have a point – Boston was in much better shape than most of the places they'd been.

Eliot was pretty sure he knew where this was going, so he wasn't surprised at all when the two goons led them into the mayor's office. Typical power-hungry despot, trying to make himself look legitimate. As the swivel chair behind the desk turned around and Eliot got his first look at Court, it took all his discipline not to punch the guy in the face.

Court had the smug, longhaired, clean-shaven face of a twenty-something who thinks he knows better than everyone else in the world despite having seen absolutely nothing of the world. He was also dressed in a suit. An expensive one, that was somehow still in perfect condition, but was clearly meant for someone a couple sizes bigger than him.

"Well, well," Court said, placing his hands in front of him on the desk and standing up slowly. "It looks like I have visitors in my town."

"Boston isn't your town," Eliot said.

Court's goons glared at him, but the man himself just laughed. He had charisma, which might have worried Eliot if Parker were the kind to fall for that, or even notice its existence. "A figure of speech," he said.

"You're living in City Hall," Eliot pointed out.

"I need to live somewhere. Wouldn't you agree?" There was a shift – subtle, but definite – as Court focused his attentions away from Eliot and onto Parker. Of course, Eliot didn't have to feel too neglected since he had two flunkies breathing down his neck, all but begging him to do something they could beat him up for.

"I'd pick somewhere with a bed," Parker said. If she noticed anything weird going on, she didn't show it. "And maybe a shower."

"Perhaps you're right," Court said. "Though we've made some improvements on the original layout here. If you'd like to stay with us, I can promise you'll be made comfortable."

Parker wrinkled her forehead. "Why would we want to stay with you?"

Eliot thought he saw a crack in Court's good temper, at that, but it was gone in a second. "I like to take care of my friends."

Parker honest-to-God looked behind her to see if there was someone else in the room he was talking too, like she was a character in a fucking Bugs Bunny cartoon. Even for Parker, that was too much, which was Eliot's first definite clue that she was playing along. "Us? You don't know us. And your flunkies weren't too polite in bringing us here."

"I apologize for that." Said flunkies shifted to hear their boss say this, and Eliot got the idea that they were going to be in trouble later. It was the first thing that'd made him really happy all day. "But their reasons were solid. I did make it clear to them how important it was to find you."

"Why?" Eliot asked.

Court spared him only the shortest glance. "I like to keep tabs on people like you," he told Parker. "There's so many of us these days, but so few who really know what's happening to them. Running around in the wild, everyone on their own, doesn't give us the chance to really learn what we can do, who we are."

"What if they don't want to learn from you?" Eliot asked again.

"You're welcome to leave, if you like." That, at least, Eliot believed whole-heartedly, assuming that Court was directing it only at him and not at Parker. How he knew Parker had her weird little talent, there was no telling, but he knew. "But I'd ask you to at least give us a try. After all, who benefits from continued ignorance?" 

Parker blinked. "The government?"

Court laughed again, which just went to show that he knew less about Parker than he thought. "And we don't have one of those to worry about anymore."

"All right," Parker said, bounding over to Eliot and throwing her arms around him. "We'll stay!" The arms around his sides squeezed all the air from his lungs before he could protest. "Won't we, _Eliot_."

"It'd be a pleasure," Eliot grunted, somehow.

Court didn't look like he bought Eliot's response for a second, but he seemed won over by Parker's enthusiasm, and that was probably what was going to matter in the long run.

Eliot just hoped that the long run didn't end up being any too long.

-

"You mind telling me what we're doing here?" Eliot asked, quietly as he could manage, the moment he and Parker were left alone in their new digs – some poor schmuck's office, retrofitted to a guest suite.

"I was hoping on finding a shower somewhere," Parker said. "You're kind of stinky by now." She laughed, and grabbed his hands, forcing him to dance around the room with her. "Stinky Eliot!"

From which he guessed she didn't want to talk, or it wasn't safe to talk, or both.

He did go find a shower, anyway. His pride could only take so much.

-

He never did learn the names of any of Court's ever-changing band of groupies, but that was fine; none of them expressed the slightest interest in Eliot, beyond occasionally looking like they'd enjoy wringing his neck, not that that worried him.

All of them were interested in Parker, which worried him constantly.

None were so interested in Parker as the man himself, who, over the course of the next few days, would constantly stop by their rooms, or just happen to run into them on the streets around City Hall, or drop off invitations for Parker and Eliot to dine with him.

Mostly Court and Parker made innocuous small talk, or the closest thing that Parker could manage. Eliot wasn't terribly surprised the second night at dinner when Parker started ranking national banks by their security measures in exhaustive detail. He was just bored, since he'd heard that lecture several times before.

Most of the rest of the conversation came down to Court trying to figure out what Parker could do, exactly. And, props to the crazy girl, she managed to never give him a straight answer, exactly.

"Melt people," she told Court one time, holding out her fingers toward him, wiggling them, and making an 'ooooh' noise. "Just turn their skin and bones to liquid, with the guts running out – "

Court's lackeys took several alarmed steps forward from where they were lingering, trying to pretend they weren't bodyguards.

"She's joking," Eliot scowled at them.

"Well, maybe I could melt someone," Parker pouted. "I've never tried before. Who wants to be my guinea pig?"

The world was just weird enough these days that no one volunteered.

Another time, she managed to put Court off with a lot of vague talk about "aren't we all special, really?" that somehow ended up with her crying on Eliot's shoulder about some bullshit incident involving being passed up in high school for the gymnastics team, which Eliot _knew_ was bullshit because Parker didn't care about teams and hadn't gone to high school.

On the other hand, they never managed to figure out what, exactly, Court could do. And if it was something that could make the endless stream of lackeys – one of whom could stop a man from breathing – obey him, Eliot figured they'd be better off finding out sooner rather than later.

One of the upshots of Court being so enchanted with Parker was that Eliot had a fair amount of time to wander and do his own thing. It only took him a few hours to get the feel for Court's business model. The lackeys went out looking for anyone who had anything good and took it from them, with a side business in kidnapping people, if he and Parker were anything to go by.

No one had been dragged back to City Hall since the two of them, but that made sense. It'd been a few months since Court's highly touted 'new world order.' Whoever they hadn't managed to dig up in that time was probably doing a pretty good job staying underground.

There was one more aspect of Court's set up that took Eliot a little too long to figure out.

"Hey," a might hand clamped down on Eliot's shoulder from above, wrenching him out of the doorway he'd been heading toward. "You're not allowed in there."

"Just looking around, man," Eliot said. "Since I'm a guest here."

The man who'd stopped him – who didn't look like he'd need any kind of enhancements to be able to make Eliot's life more difficult – crossed a pair of very impressive arms over his chest. "You're not allowed in there."

"See they keep you around for your brain, big guy," Eliot bared his teeth.

The guy didn't take the chance to pummel him. Apparently there was some commitment, however mild, to keeping up the pretense that Eliot was a welcome guest in Court's City Hall.

Eliot didn't push the issue any further. If there was anything of value to be found in City Hall, he wasn't going to find it with a couple watchful eyes and biceps hovering over him.

He took to investigating Boston by himself, leaving Parker to discover whatever there was to find at City Hall. The weather was still humid and gross, but being out from under those watchful eyes felt refreshing, and he had a mission.

There had to be people in Boston besides Court and his thugs – there were the guys who'd tried to rob them, plus whoever Court's buddies were stealing from. There had to be others. Eliot was going to find those others and get them to share everything they knew about what'd happened in Boston since April.

That was the plan, anyway.

After two days of walking – stopping by the old offices twice, but there wasn't any sign of anyone having been there in their absence – Eliot hadn't seen another living soul.

Once, he could have sworn he heard footsteps behind him, but there was no one there.

-

Eliot returned to City Hall in a bad mood. He'd been wanting to punch someone for days now, and seeing Boston turned into a ghost town wasn't doing any wonders for his mood.

"Where've you been?" one of Court's goons asked as he returned. Eliot was good about remembering faces, but he'd have remembered this guy anyway; the man was 6' 4" and had a skull tattooed on his forehead, which had to be one of the worst decisions Eliot had ever seen.

"Went for a walk," Eliot growled. "Ya'll can stop worrying and going back to kissing Court's ass."

By this point, it didn't even feel like picking a fight. Eliot was so used to everything he said in this building being treated with condescension and dismissal.

It wasn't much of an excuse for being caught off guard. But it was the best he could offer for why the thug was able to land a solid, skin-splitting punch to Eliot's left cheek, with another landing on his torso.

Eliot reeled, the smack of the wall against his back waking him up and giving him a surface to push off against as he swung back with his own offense.

And watched, dumbfounded, as his fist passed through the man's chest without making contact, without any resistance whatsoever.

"We don't like your kind here," the guy said, grabbing Eliot's right arm and squeezing. Eliot knew exactly how much more pressure the thug would have to use to snap the bone. And he could tell the thug knew, too. "Your time's running out. Don't forget that. This isn't your world, loser."

He squeezed just that last bit harder.

Eliot cried out.

"Don't forget," the thug said, throwing Eliot to the ground and walking off.

-

Eliot remembered. Not likely he'd ever forget that. Forget –

– Parker helping him into a harness, laughing at him because he wasn't thrilled about jumping off a 42 story building, you know, like a normal person – 

– Parker going to attach her harness to the rope –

– Parker clutching her head, crying out in pain, stumbling to the side –

– nothing to the side, just air, all 42 stories of it –

– and Eliot, not even sure he'd got all the twisty ties and straps right, not even sure he'd be able to catch her in time, diving after.

Parker wasn't the only one. People all over the world had that same flash of pain. Most of them weren't standing on top of skyscrapers, but plenty of them were driving, or operating machinery, or operating on a patient. The initial loss of life was tremendous.

Not as tremendous as the second wave of destruction.

Not as bad as what happened once people knew what they were doing.

-

Parker came prancing into their room when Eliot had almost finished splinting his arm.

Given that she was honest to god prancing like a dressage horse, kicking up her heels and doing a little spin, Eliot didn't really have a lot of fondness toward her.

"Where the hell have you been?" he demanded.

"Talking to Court," Parker said, "duh."

Because yes, that was where she always was, the last few days, so he could have assumed that. But why was it okay for that to be _normal_?

Eliot hadn't intended to share any of these thoughts, but everything else in his life was out of control, so why not his own mind. He knew that Parker heard, because she made a squinty angry face at him – not the exaggerated angry face she used on cons, to fluster people into making mistakes. The real one was so close to her neutral expression that it was almost invisible.

Then she stepped further into the room and saw Eliot's arm, and whatever argument they'd been about to have evaporated.

"What happened?" she asked.

"One of your boyfriend's thugs." Okay, Eliot was still allowed one petty swipe, under the circumstances. It was his arm that was fucking broken, while Parker was dancing around like the queen of the freaks.

"You used to be so good at fighting people and not breaking your arms," Parker said, squatting beside him.

"Yeah, well, times change, don't they?"

"Why'd you fight?"

Eliot sighed. Splinting his arm and talking was about half a thing too many to do at once. "Don't know if you noticed this, but they all hate me here."

Parker snorted. "I know that better than you do."

"Really. Because, _arm_."

"I meant, I can feel it. I can hear it." She reached out, slowly and cautiously, for the splint. "It isn't very nice."

Eliot held his breath. When was the last time Parker had touched him? When he'd tackled her? No, when they'd fought that invisible woman. Parker didn't like physical contact much these days.

The touch of his fingers on his arms was like a fly landing on his skin. 

"They're all – changed ones," Eliot said. "They don't like that I'm..."

"You can say 'normal'," Parker told him, tying off the splint with steady hands. "I'm weird, Court's weird, you're normal. I'm used to that."

"If everyone here's one way except me, doesn't that make me the weird one?"

Parker shrugged. "I know you don't think that for real."

"I think they're really gonna kill me if we stay here too long," Eliot said. "And I don't even want to guess what they're going to do to you. I'd rather someone like Court hate me than be obsessed with me."

"I don't know what they can do to us." Parker finished tying the last knot and pulled her hands back, like his skin had suddenly caught fire. "I've been trying to figure it out, but he's – he doesn't think in a straight line. I'm pretty sure we're safe in this room. At least, they can't hear us."

"You haven't got anything out of his brain?" Eliot asked.

"Little bits, and pieces," Parker said. "Like breadcrumbs in that horrible little story about the children that murder the old woman."

Eliot was not going to think about what other fairy tales Parker had totally missed the point of. No, no, no.

"So can't you just follow the breadcrumbs?"

Parker looked him in the eye again, her angry face having slipped back into place at some point. "No."

She somehow managed to storm out of the room without actually leaving it.

Eliot left it at that. He needed a fucking nap.

-

Waking up felt like coming back from the dead and stopping halfway, so Eliot wasn't in the mood to have the first thing he saw be Court's smug face.

"Haven't you done enough?" he asked.

Court and Parker had grim expressions on their faces. Maybe he should have eavesdropped on whatever conversation they'd been having instead of interrupting. But damn it, Eliot was tired of being shut out of conversations. Court was going to listen to him this time.

"Yes, I understand you've been having a bad time here," Court said. "Perhaps you'd prefer to leave. Now."

"Don't have to ask me twice," Eliot said, pushing himself up with his good arm. "Let's go, Parker."

"It's not going to work like that," Parker said, one arm wrapped around herself. "Court here has just been explaining to me how I'm going to stay here."

"Really." Eliot took a few steps toward the creep. "Because I don't need two hands to beat the shit out of you."

"You are just incapable of understanding, aren't you?" Court smirked. "You don't belong here. She does. Come on, girl," he said, holding out a hand to Parker. Showed what he knew. Parker didn't hold hands. "You're one of us."

"No, I'm not," Parker said, stepping away from Court.

"Fine, then." Court gestured toward the door. "If you want to leave, leave."

There was a trick, it was only a question of what. Eliot was cautious as he crossed the room, opened the door, and slowly poked his head through.

There was no one there. Not that he could see. Not that he could hear, or smell, or sense in anyway.

It was possible that the trick was in here, with Court, so Eliot gestured for Parker to go through the door first, facing forward, and departed the room, eyes still locked on Court's.

And somehow – in the space of three steps in a straight line, without looking away from Court – Eliot found himself walking back through the same doorway he'd just left.

"Parker, what just – "

"Sht." She held up a hand to silence him. Her eyes darted back and forth to every corner of the room.

Court stood up, slowly, and Eliot had to give it to him. For the first time since he'd met him, Court actually looked menacing.

"Don't you see?" he asked softly. "This is my town. If I say she stays, she stays."

Screw that, Eliot can be menacing, too. "You won't be saying anything if I punch all your teeth in."

"No, it's not him," Parker said.

"What?" Eliot asked.

"It's not him doing the room thing," she said. "There's someone outside. Court isn't the one keeping us here, he's just telling that guy what to do."

"Isn't that interesting," Eliot said. "Even when you're here alone, you're hiding behind one of your thugs. Can you even do anything for yourself?"

"I can make your life hell," Court said.

"You don't even know the meaning of the word." Eliot curled his hand into a fist. "But you will soon."

"Oh my God now I get it," Parker shouted. "I finally get it – you and your sneaky little mind have been driving me _crazy_ but I finally know now. I get it!"

She laughed and jumped on the balls of her feet like a teenage girl at a rock concert, which sort of put a damper on the fight Eliot was trying to pick with Court.

"You wanna share with the rest of us, Parker?" Eliot said.

"Court has someone who can find people," Parker explained. "She can tell who's been changed and who hasn't. Then Court goes out and recruits them to do his dirty work and feeds them a lot of nonsense about the world order and superiority and all that."

"Yeah, he's got a little cult of freaks. What's so exciting?"

Eliot didn't know what was coming, but Court did. The tin-pot despot lunged at Parker, and ugly look on his face.

Eliot grabbed him and shoved him against the wall. "You don't get to hurt Parker." He squeezed Court's windpipe, enjoying the hell out of the moment. "Got that?"

Court tried to say something, but couldn't get his words out.

"You want to continue, Parker?"

Parker giggled, which after all this time still had the power to give Eliot nightmares. "Oh, this is the good part. This is so, so great."

"Get on with it, Parker."

"You know what Court's power is?"

Eliot sighed. He was going to play along whether he liked it or not. "Greasy hair?" he guessed.

Parker barely let him finish talking before the words flew out of her mouth. "He doesn't have one!" She started laughing so hard she snorted. "He's got all these people running around doing what he says, and they all think he's some big scary tough guy, and he can't do _anything_!" She whooped so hard she had to sit down.

"Really," Eliot said, turning back to Court and letting the grip on his throat loosen. "That is _fascinating_. I wonder what all your little supremacist friends would have to say about that?"

"They wouldn't believe you," Court said hoarsely. "You're just a scumbag – "

"Ah, ah, ah," Eliot interrupted. "That's not very nice. Come on, brother, we're in this together now. Team humanity, right? Us vs. them, isn't that what your buddies would say?"

"You wouldn't tell them."

"I would love _nothing_ better. And sure, they might not believe us right away – though they all seem dead sure Parker's opinion is worth something, at least – but they must all be wanting to see proof that you can do _something_ by this point. And what exactly would you have to show them?"

Court glared for a second, but the fight was ebbing out of him, and he wasn't an idiot, just human. "What do you want?"

"I want you to call your dogs off," Eliot said. "Me and Parker walk out of here and you never bother us again."

"I can't let you run around my town," Court said. "That kind of thing damages my credibility."

"Not as much as what five little words from her mouth would do."

"Court doesn't have any powers," Parker piped up in a singsong tone. "Court is a liar."

Eliot counted. "Okay, nine words."

Court grit his teeth. Eliot wasn't the mind reader here, but he could tell that Court was thinking about making some dramatic gesture – spitting in his face, maybe, or head butting him. Eliot kind of wished he'd try it.

Instead, Court broke eye contact. "Fine. Just get out of my sight."

"Gladly," Eliot said, dropping Court. "Tell your goons to let us go."

Court knocked some kind of code on the wall before wrenching the door open again. "Go."

Eliot was all too happy to oblige him, but Parker stopped to whisper something in his ear.

They strode out of City Hall, side by side, and Eliot wasn't going to ask, but he wondered to himself, and that was as good as asking.

"I just let him know what I thought of his hospitality," Parker said.

-

Court proved to be surprisingly good at living up to his word, because that was the last they heard from him, with one exception.

There was a knock on the door, about a week after they'd moved back into the office and Eliot had started to remember how deserted this part of town was.

He pulled the door open, on high alert, to find a tiny wisp of a woman waiting on the other side of the doorway.

"Can I help you?" he asked.

"I'm Lindsey," she said. "Court's sister."

"Ooh, this is the one!" Parker said, scurrying up to the door and pointing at Lindsey like maybe Eliot would think she was talking about someone else. "She's the one who found me."

Lindsey looked annoyed at having her thunder stolen and stuck her hands on her hips like she was trying to look threatening. "Yes, I did," she said, in a tiny, whispery voice. "And I could do it again, any time."

"Congratulations, you have magic person GPS," Eliot said. "What the hell are you doing bothering us with it?"

"I wanted to settle things," she said.

"We did settle things," Parker pointed out. "With your brother. Eliot didn't hurt him too badly, did he?"

"My brother went too easy on you," Lindsey said. "I'm here to fix that mistake."

"Shoulda brought some of the goon squad with you," Eliot said, hoping the splint on his arm came off in more of an 'I've survived worse' kind of way than a 'I'm in a weakened state' kind of way.

"We both know why I can't risk that," she answered. "But I don't need them to hurt you."

"No, but they'd've helped. Especially since you just gave us a heads up that you're gunning for us."

"There doesn't need to be any more trouble here. You just need to leave."

"And your brother needs to keep his promises, or he's going to have a whole lot more trouble on his hands."

Lindsey exhaled violently. "My brother is not a planner. He is not the bright one. But he is an unfortunate necessity. People listen to him. People don't exactly follow me into battle."

"Funny," Eliot said. "Why'd you think there's a battle that needs fighting, anyway? All that nonsense about new world orders, that didn't come from Court either, did it."

Lindsey's eyes were cold in a way even Eliot didn't see very often, not outside active battle zones and torture chambers. She might be 90 pounds soaking wet, but she sure as hell wasn't harmless. "I don't like you in my town," she said precisely.

"Too bad," Eliot answered. "We got business here."

"I suggest you finish it. Soon."

Parker stepped back, her face looking troubled.

Lindsey, whatever else their differences, apparently shared Court's love of dramatic flair, because she left before either of them could get the last word in.

"I don't like her brain," Parker said.

"Breadcrumbs?" Eliot asked.

Parker shook her head. "It's like plunging straight into the oven."

Eliot wasn't terribly worried about Lindsey, oven or no oven. She looked like she'd put up a hell of a fight if it came down to it, but if Eliot wanted to stay in a place, there wasn't much that was going to push him out.

But that was the question. _If._

Eliot shut the door. "It's been four months, Parker," he said. "How much longer we gonna wait here for a sign?"

Parker didn't answer.


	5. August

Eliot admitted, in the spaces of his mind that he knew Parker had always shared, that Nate and Hardison and Sophie were dead.

They left Boston.


	6. September

Eliot and Parker rolled into town at dusk. They traveled light, just two bikes, some clean clothes, and the few souvenirs from a previous life that could fit into their pockets. It was enough to get by on; they'd earn their keep in town.

Besides, Parker had stashes all across the damn world of all kinds of random crap, some of which were even useful.

The town consisted of a small grouping of houses around a quaint downtown Main Street. It would've looked cute on a postcard, if you ignored the buildings that showed some recent fire damage.

These seemed like the kinds of places that were thriving these days. Small coalitions were faring better than the big cities. They'd passed through a couple places like this since leaving Boston and generally had found they could get a few meals if Eliot helped out with any reconstructing that needed doing, though the people were neither so well-off nor so comfortable with strangers that either Parker or Eliot wanted to linger too long.

"Tired of biking yet? " Eliot asked Parker

"I've always been tired of biking," she complained. "Who ever does this for fun?"

Eliot smirked at her and started whistling "Daisy Bell."

Parker shuddered visibly. "Bicycle built for two is a lie."

There was something to be grateful for: They were not riding tandem bikes.

"Let's go introduce ourselves to the natives," Eliot said. They were already getting pointed looks from the few strangers in sight, a few women who were standing outside a grocery store and an older man who was already crossing the street to come talk to them.

Parker glowered but didn't move away. Eliot knew that she'd rather skip the part where they talked with people, but the alternative was holing up somewhere outside of any remnants of civilization, or hiding like ghosts on the fringes of town, and those were hardly improvements.

"Hello there," the man said, offering them a welcoming smile though not, Eliot noticed, a hand to shake. His right hand was hanging, casually, over a belt, where a gun sat snugly in its holster. "Name's Jackson Cole, can I help you folks?"

"Howdy," Eliot said, letting his accent slip through a little more clearly than usual. It tended to set people at ease. "I'm Eliot, this here's Parker," because why even bother with aliases at this point?

Parker nodded violently at Cole before taking an abrupt step that put her halfway behind Eliot.

Cole raised his eyebrow at that, slightly.

"My kid sister," Eliot added. Maybe they didn't need to lie about who they were, but that was simpler than explaining and it got the point across real fast that Eliot wouldn't appreciate anyone fucking with Parker in any way. "We were just admiring this fine town you've got yourself here."

"We've been doing all right for ourselves, considering," Cole said.

"Seems like all right is just about what you can hope for, these days."

"You two from nearby?"

Eliot shook his head. "We were on vacation out in New York City when it happened. Hell of a time to finally travel the world, you know?"

Cole shook his head at the misfortune. "Heard the city didn't fare to well."

"That it did not," Eliot said, pausing to push away imagined trauma. "That it did not."

The man's posture eased a little more, and he leaned slightly closer to them. "Heading somewhere in particular? Back home?"

"We were so focused on getting out of the city, I think after that we've just been trying to keep going forward. Haven't been thinking too much about where."

"It's a bad time to be traveling," Cole said. He looked back over his shoulder at the grocery store, where the women had been joined by some friends and were all blatantly staring at the newcomers. Parker hissed – quietly enough that Eliot was pretty sure Cole couldn't hear - and took another step backward. 

Cole turned back to Eliot, like he was about to say something, but checked back over at his shoulder. "Best of luck to you two," he said. It was not what he'd been originally planning to say.

Eliot hadn't been expecting on getting shut down so quickly – though the man still sounded friendly, it was hard to read that as anything other than an end to the conversation. Which, fine, they could rough it on their own for tonight, but the lights of town were in sight, and somewhere Eliot ached, for a bed, for real food, and for human company more than anything else.

"Look, I don't want to be forward," Eliot said, as forward as he thought he could get away with. "But we've been traveling so long and it's been a hell of a road from New York. If y'all have any space for us, even just for a night or two – "

"He's good at stuff," Parker said, suddenly, somehow managing to give Eliot a comradely slap on the back without actually touching him. "I can help out, too."

Parker must have liked whatever she was seeing in Cole's mind to pipe up like that.

"We don't mean to take anything you can't spare," Eliot continued. 

Cole tugged his beard, clearly at war with himself, but Eliot didn't worry. Parker was relaxed behind him, standing at ease and breathing normally, so he couldn't be thinking anything too bad.

"You'll have to talk to town council," Cole finally spoke. "Not that we don't like helping folks in a pinch, of course, but anyone could just come by..."

"You gotta protect your home," Eliot said. "I get that, no such thing as being too careful. Parker and me, we'd love to meet town council, wouldn't we?"

"Woot," Parker said. If she sounded any less enthusiastic, she'd be dead. Eliot glanced over his shoulder with a meaningful look, and she perked up a little. "Town council, yay!"

-

It was actually kind of impressive, how much Cooperstown was able to carry on with its business like nothing had happened. As Cole led them down Main Street, Eliot saw that not all the buildings had escaped damage, but several still had power. The grocery store wasn't the only business that was still open, though Eliot couldn't imagine that people were still using money like it meant anything.

Parker looked at him, disgusted, as he had the thought.

"How's business doing?" Eliot asked, nodding at a restaurant that seemed to have a decent sized dinner crowd. "I'd think you weren't still getting shipments, for one thing."

Cole waved at a family sitting at a table on the patio before answering. "Business isn't what it used to be, for sure," Cole said. "Things are working on a strictly barter system these days, and most of the food we've got is local grown."

"I saw we passed some farmhouses as we were coming into town," Eliot said. "Didn't notice them operating."

"You came from the east?" Cole asked, and at Eliot's nod, continued: "Most of the farms that're still running are out the south road. But we've got a lot of people starting up gardens in their yards, building some chicken coops closer to town, that sort of thing. Reminds me of my dad's stories about having a victory garden during the war."

"Everyone doing their part," Eliot said, but Parker stomped over his words with the question:

"Aren't chickens really gross?"

Cole laughed. "They aren't too pleasant, no, but they're worth it. Goats, now, I wouldn't want to raise a goat."

"Obviously. They're like mini horses," Parker said, wrinkling her nose.

It wasn't too long before they got where they were going – not a City Hall; Eliot didn't think he'd have felt too comfortable in that case. Instead, they walked up a perfectly normal looking driveway leading to an appallingly ugly house. The kind that had had a couple different additions added onto it without any care for making sure the new matched the old.

Cole knocked on the red front door and an old man opened.

"Oscar, good to see you. Is Lila home?"

"Not yet, but it should be any minute now." He peered over Cole's shoulder and spotted Eliot and Parker. "You got some visitors there, or do I need to go put my glasses on?"

"Visitors. They want to talk to the town council about staying on for a bit," Cole said.

"Well, come on in, there's plenty of room for everyone inside."

They trooped inside, Eliot carefully wiping his feet before stepping inside and staring Parker down until she did the same, albeit more haphazardly. They found themselves in an honest to God kitchen. Sure, the evening's meal was being prepared in a big cast-iron pot over a wood fire, but it was still the most beautiful thing Eliot had seen in months.

He inhaled deeply. "Garlic?" he asked. The place reeked of it.

"Nothing fancy," Oscar said. "But I do my best."

"Do you mind if I – " Eliot gestured toward the pot.

"Eliot's a very good chef," Parker explained. "Learned cooking on mama's knee."

Eliot just prayed that Parker wouldn't start faking a Southern accent to match his. They'd been down this road before, and it didn't end well.

"Be my guest," Oscar waved him over.

Eliot tasted the stew and found it – wanting. Well, this wasn't the time for haute cuisine, but that didn't mean he couldn't improve things.

He busied himself in the kitchen, though kept his ears sharp for any conversation, especially if Cole or Oscar decided to take advantage of his seeming lack of interest.

Mostly he was disappointed.

"You inherit an interest in cooking, too?" Cole asked Parker.

"I was always off playing in the dirt," Parker deadpanned. "I couldn't keep my hands clean long enough to cook."

Eliot had absolutely no trouble believing that, and he knew it was a lie, or at least based off one.

As Eliot rescued the stew, more people started to drift in. They all greeted Cole and Oscar by name, and were perfectly polite to Parker, if by and large reserved.

Eliot held his breath as the first guest, than the second, attempted to make small talk with Parker, but she handled it admirably.

"Oh, it's been horribly muggy out east," Parker said brightly to a red-haired, freckled woman who had just come in. "But the weather's so nice today."

Small talk must be so much easier when you know what someone is expecting to hear.

Eliot shook his head. It wasn't like Parker was useless at talking to people, before. And she'd done good work on some cons. It was just too easy for him to give her less credit than she deserved.

Eliot looked up, the heat of the fire below him making sweat run into his eyes, and found Parker looking straight at him, her mouth a thin line.

She turned away once he's met her eyes and laughed, brightly and falsely, at someone's joke.

"I said I was sorry," he muttered to himself.

The stew was ready – and much improved – yet the crowd seemed no more ready to discuss business than when Eliot and Parker had first arrived.

"We waiting on anything?" he asked, as Oscar tasted the stew.

"Son, you have a gift," Oscar said, taking a second bite of stew. "If it were up to me, you'd be staying in town as long as you like."

"Who is it up to?" Eliot asked.

His answer came in the form of a new arrival – a white-haired woman who came through the door and was greeted with calls of "Lila!" from all over the room.

Oscar walked forward to clasp Lila's hands and give her a brief kiss. "Lila, dear," he said walking her back over to Eliot. Parker had somehow appeared at his side, and for all his training and instincts and inability to trust anyone, Eliot couldn't for the life of him say when or how she'd got there. "I'd like you to meet Eliot and his sister, Parker."

Eliot shook Lila's hand, firmly but not too firmly. "It's a pleasure, ma'am," he said.

These days, he didn't need to elbow Parker to get her to nod respectfully and say "Thank you for your hospitality," though he had a feeling she was going to have some choice words for him later that night.

"Mr. Eliot, Miss Parker, so good to meet you," Lila said. She had a pretty good grip herself, not to mention a steady, clear gaze that looked the both of them up and down until Eliot nearly felt unsure of himself. There was no telling what she could to do them with one look – but if she were anything too out of the ordinary, or harbored any really unsympathetic tendencies, Parker would surely let him know.

"Eliot here is quite the chef," Oscar continued cheerfully.

"So nothing like you then, dear?" Lila asked.

Oscar chuckled. "Why don't we all sit down together and break our bread."

-

Dinner was – unusual.

Eliot gathered pretty quickly that everyone around the table – save him, Parker, Oscar, and Cole – were the town council they'd all been waiting for.

It also didn't take him long to realize that "town council" wasn't who he needed to impress. It was all going to come down to Lila.

Each of the councilors brought their problems up – in casual, probably sanitized ways – for Lila's approval, and hung on what she had to say about it.

The dynamic was so creepily familiar after a while that Eliot had to catch Parker's eye and very deliberately think, Court?

Parker shook her head. Soon as it was inconspicuous to do so, she leaned over and whispered to him, "They just trust her."

"Should we?" he asked.

Parker leaned back and resumed eating without answering him.

Fair enough. It was a stupid question.

Dinner was wrapping up and Oscar was starting to clear the dishes – after a mental and physical prod from Eliot, who nudged her foot with his own, Parker volunteer told help – when Lila finally turned to the matter to business.

"Jackson tells me you were thinking of staying in town," Lila said to Eliot.

"That's what I was hoping," he said. "My sister and I, we've been traveling for a long time. It sure would mean the world to us if you'd let us stop and catch our breath."

"I'm sure you understand our reluctance," Lila told him. "We've been very fortunate, compared to some of our neighboring towns. We just want to be sure we aren't opening ourselves up to opportunists."

"I understand," Eliot said. "Hell, I'd probably feel the same way in your place. And if you tell us to go right this second, we will. But – it's been a long way by bike, and longer'n that on foot. A day or two's rest here won't hurt you much and it'd mean the world to us."

Lila looked around at the rest of the council for a moment. "Could you excuse us for a moment?" she asked him.

"Gladly," Eliot said. "I'll just – step outside?"

"I'll come with you," Cole said, rising from the table. "The stars should be coming out around about now. It ought to be a fine view from the porch."

Eliot allowed himself to be steered out to the front of the house. He carefully observed as Oscar led Parker out around the back of the house on some pretext about herb gardens.

"So what do you think?" Eliot asked Cole. "You know the council better'n I do."

Cole sighed. Eliot got the idea he wasn't expecting a direct question. "They're politicians, aren't they," he asked rhetorically. "Even if they are small time. Who can tell what they're gonna do?"

"Seemed like everyone was hanging on Ms. Lila's words," Eliot nudged.

"She's been on the council for ages," Cole waved the implied question off. "And she's done a good job of looking out for us so far. Cooperstown hasn't had outsiders, not since the spring. I think you'd be good for us. But it's easy to see why people's be nervous about you."

"Makin' people nervous," Eliot said with a sigh. "Thought I'd left that behind me."

Cole looked at him, very carefully not reacting. Eliot wondered what information Oscar was trying to wring out of Parker.

Eliot shrugged, like he was uncomfortable with the silence. "I was Special Forces," he said. "Ages ago. But you never really forget a thing like that. How it makes people look at you."

Cole nodded, appeased. "I was Navy, back in the day," he said. "That really was ages ago. Look, if it was my decision – "

Eliot didn't hear the rest of Cole's statement, though he could guess what it was. One of the council – Eliot thought his name might have been Ross – poked his head out. "We'd like to speak to you again," he said, so Eliot and Cole stamped their feet on the welcome rug once more before re-entering the house.

"Mr. Eliot," Lila said, pointing him back toward the chair he'd been in moments before. It didn't escape his notice that Cole remained standing. Eliot did as well. "We've been discussing your request."

"And?" Eliot asked. "Sorry for my bluntness, but I do prefer knowing how I stand with people."

"I do wish you'd feel comfortable enough to relax," Lila told him. "But I suppose that isn't the purpose. Mr. Elliot, we're willing to consider your request to stay here for the time being."

"Why, thank you, Ms. Lila," Eliot said, as genteel as he'd ever known how.

"There are a few conditions," Lila told him.

"I can't say I object to the concept," Eliot said. "Shoot."

"We may seem rather prosperous after your wanderings," Lila told him. "But we're still a community that's rebuilding. We've had our share of trauma. And we expect all our citizens to do their part to help rebuild. That would include you and your sister, for as long as you stay."

"Not a problem," Eliot said. "I'm happy to help wherever I can. But my sister – she's a bit sickly," he said. A few of the councilmen, Ross included, shifted in their seats. "Nothing dangerous," Eliot reassured them. "She ain't contagious. But she doesn't handle excitement too well. People make her tired."

Lila exchanged a long look with Cole. Eliot, trying to remain as innocent and scrupulous as possible, kept his eyes on Lila and missed at least half the meaning of that look.

Eventually, Lila looked back down at him. "Very well," she said. "We're happy to have you with us – provided neither of you causes us any trouble."

"We'll be quiet as church mice," Eliot promised. "You'll hardly know we're here."

"I should hope that remains the case," Lila promised. "Oscar, do you think there's somewhere we could place our new guests that would agree with Ms. Parker's temperament?"

"There's the Noll's farmhouse," Oscar suggested. "Just outside town lines. Small, but it should be perfect for the two of you."

He didn't ask about the former residents of said farmhouse.

In retrospect, that might have been an oversight.

-

It really was a nice house they'd been set up in. Two bedroom, lights still worked thanks to a generator, but the water was out everywhere but the kitchen. Nobody'd confuse it for a luxury inn, but it provided a hell of a lot more privacy and comfort than they'd been living with on the road.

Mostly, though, Eliot worried about security. It hardly seemed worth locking the doors when the town's council could have kept the spare key.

Then there was the man outside. He was pretty good at hiding, for an amateur. But Eliot was better at looking.

"They're watching us," Parker said, curling up on the couch. Course, she didn't have to look out the window to know. "There's a man on the corner. Behind the wall."

"Yeah, well, we'd be watching us, too," Eliot said. "And we'd probably be more invasive about it."

Parker smiled fondly at the ceiling. "This place has some spacious vents." She sounded almost disturbingly nostalgic.

"You aren't going to start sleeping in the walls or anything, are you?"

Parker shrugged. "They wouldn't find me so easily if they came looking for us in the middle of the night."

"Are they planning on coming for us?"

Parker shook her head. "They're just nervous."

Eliot crossed over to the kitchen to take stock. "Who isn't?"

-

True to his word, Eliot showed up in town the next morning to help with the town's reconstruction.

"Surprised you even need it," he told Cole as they met up in front of the town's remaining restaurant, where a smiling waitress offered him a cup of coffee. Coffee, for crying out loud, when was the last time he'd had _coffee_. "Doesn't seem like anything's wrong here to be fixed."

"Everyone's got their troubles," Cole said philosophically. "And we've patched some of the worst of it up already. But I wouldn't mind a hand fixing up some of the outlying buildings."

Eliot shrugged. "I got two good hands," he said. "Where'd you need 'em?"

That was the longest conversation they had all day. Eliot'd half expected Cole to grill him endlessly about where he and Parker'd come from, to try and figure out their motives. But Cole kept his thoughts to himself, except to make short, direct statements about the task at hand.

They rebuilt a fence around one farm and repaired a gaping hole in the wall of another, and Eliot barely had to say anything.

It also meant he had few chances to get any information out of Cole, but Parker'd said they weren't in any immediate danger and Eliot's instincts backed her up on that. He didn't quite let himself feel secure, but it was oddly soothing to fall into the rhythms of working with his hands. Taking something broken and being able to fix it.

Which made it a little jolting for him to come home that afternoon to find Parker curled up on the couch, looking at a charred photograph.

"They look happy," Parker said. "At least, the guy does. The woman's face is all burnt."

Eliot wasn't entirely sure if she meant that the scorch marks obscured the woman's face of if the woman actually had burn scars on her face. He decided not to ask.

"Where do you think they are?" Parker asked. "If they were still around they'd be living here, right? So they must have left. Or maybe died."

"Why're you getting maudlin?" Eliot asked. "Do you really want to know everything that's happened to everybody in the last five months?"

Parker shrugged. "Passes the time," she said. "You wouldn't let me go into town."

"I didn't – it's not – what'd you mean, _let_ you go into town?"

"You thought I'd do something stupid and make people mad," Parker said.

"Is that hard to believe? You drive me crazy all the time," Eliot said. "And I'm used to you. So yeah, maybe I don't think it's a great idea to unleash you on the whole world. That doesn't mean – it's not like you can't leave."

"And what would I do?" Parker asked. "I can talk to people, but only if I don't say anything that could make them worry about us, because they don't trust us and we don't trust them. So I have to be careful what I say, which makes me tired, and I have to listen to what they're saying and what they're thinking so that I know whether or not I'm being weird, which makes me more tired and makes me sad. I don't like listening to what people think. I don't even like listening to what they say, most of the time." She flipped the photograph over. "Oh, look, there's a date here." She squinted at it. "Old photo. Maybe they are dead, after all."

"Look, you want to go into town? Go into town tomorrow," Eliot said. "I'm sure Cole could find something for you to do. And say whatever the hell you want. I don't care. Tell everyone you're an international cat burglar. Maybe they'd think that's a real hoot."

"And then what?" Parker asked, flipping the photo back over. "We make friends and live in a dead person's house forever?"

Eliot's mouth open and shut, torn between not wanting to say _I don't know_ and a refusing to say nothing at all.

Finally, he settled on, "You hungry or what?"

"Starving," Parker answered. "The guy spying on us had roast beef for lunch, it was all he could think about."

"Charming," Eliot said, before starting to look over the things Cole had given him as payment for his day's work.

-

"Your sister's doing better," Cole observed, handing Eliot a wrench.

Eliot tried wiping sweat off his forehead, but ended up just covering his face with grease. "Yeah?" he asked.

"Oscar says the place really agrees with her." Cole had set Parker up running errands for Lila and Oscar, which mostly amounted to her taking messages and supplies from Main Street to the outlying farms and back. Parker was now on her bicycle for most of the day. Eliot tried to pretend that this didn't amuse him in any fashion, and mostly failed.

"It's a pretty agreeable place," Eliot nodded. "Plus Oscar's an easy guy to get along with."

"And you're liking it here?" Cole asked.

"What's not to like?" Eliot shrugged the question off, turning his attention back to the guts of the tractor they were trying to resurrect.

There was about thirty seconds of silence where Eliot felt sure Cole was going to push whatever point he'd been about to make. They passed.

"Take a look at this, will you?" Eliot asked.

-

"Having fun?" Eliot asked Parker as she stomped across the restaurant's lawn.

"How could I not?" she deadpanned. "I have a loving brother, a roof over my head, three square meals a day – "

" – yeah, getting enough food to eat is such a bitch."

"I can actually feel this place boring me to death," Parker hissed at him.

"Sorry they don't have a world-class art museum," Eliot replied. He kept an easy grin on his face and casually looked over Parker's shoulder, but it didn't seem like any of the restaurant patrons were paying them any mind. "Is this your way of saying you aren't joining me and Cole for dinner?"

"You know I hate that place," Parker said.

"Didn't know that, actually."

"Well, you should have," she said, hugging her own arms uncomfortably. "Everybody gets together in there and they're all so – fake. It's the end of the world. What is there to pretend about?"

Now this was getting interesting. "They're lying to us?" Eliot asked.

Parker sighed and rolled her head around like her neck was hurting her. "Not exactly. I mean, it isn't about what they're saying, is it? It's more like – they've all got something they don't want to think about."

"Couple hundred people all keeping secrets from themselves," Eliot said. "Can't be a good thing."

"No," Parker said. "And the town council is super interested in what we're doing here, by the way. I'd tell the nice young man they've assigned to follow me, to save him the effort of sneaking around and trying not to get spotted – which he sucks at – except I don't know what we're doing here."

"Building up our reserves," Eliot answered.

Parker raised an eyebrow.

"You got a better idea?" Eliot asked her.

"Yes, it's called bring me leftovers," Parker said, stomping away. "I'll be at our probably haunted house."

"Anytime, little sis," Eliot said, waving at her and smiling hugely. Lila had just stepped out of the restaurant.

"Mr. Eliot," she greeted him. "Your sister won't be joining us?"

"Didn't know there was an us for her to join," Eliot answered. "Anyway, she's gonna have a little lie down. Long day."

"Of course," Lila said. "Then I hope you'll feel welcome at my table."

"It'd be an honor," Eliot said, following her inside.

Lila took her seat, pointing to the empty chair across from her. "Jackson Cole tells me you've been a great help these last few days."

Eliot settled in, smiling and nodding at the other occupants of the table. Most of them he recognized from dinner that first night. So the town council was sniffing around him again. "He's made it easy. Always nice to work with someone who knows what they're doing."

"Funny," Lila said drily, as a waiter brought by the daily special. "He said almost exactly the same thing about you."

Eliot smiled and didn't answer. He was good at creating the right kind of silence.

It seemed Lila was just as good at waiting.

The council members at the other end of the table were starting to squirm a little.

"Ms. Lila," Eliot said finally. "I can't help but feel you want something from me."

"That's a bit gauche," she replied. "But not inaccurate."

"I've always been a cut to the chase kind of guy."

"Very well," Lila told him. "Then I shall not dance around the subject. Since April, there have been some changes to the world as we know it."

"I know it blew up in everyone's faces," Eliot said.

"It was made to blow up," Lila said. "There are people in this world with the power to do terrible things. We can't accept you here until we're sure you aren't one of them."

Eliot nodded slowly. It wasn't an entirely surprising request, but – "If you don't mind my asking, how do you expect to know for sure?"

"We can't," Lila answered. "Hence our dilemma."

"I've definitely run into the kind of people you're talking about," Eliot said. "Nasty customers. And unless I'm very mistaken, I've been helping to clean up after a couple of them right here in town the last few days. Get some drifters before us that made trouble?"

"I'm afraid the trouble came from within town lines. One of our council members, even. There were a few – nuisances, before that. Young people acting out. It would hardly have been worthwhile except we couldn't figure out how they were causing as much trouble as they were."

"What happened to them?" Eliot asked.

"The sheriff locked them up, but they escaped," Lila told him. "Blew the roof right off the sheriff's office and weren't seen since. We all had bigger concerns, what with the news coming out of the cities. Then we lost our connections to the outside world. The news stopped coming, the phone lines went dead, the servers crashed..."

"Yeah," Eliot said. "Yeah, I remember what that was like."

"We had people come through town, trying to get to New York, trying to get out of New York, trying to hide," Lila said. "We tried to be helpful at first but there were too many of them. Before long we were not in a position to be generous."

"And this council member," Eliot said. A few of the other council members were looking green, guilty. They'd be such easy marks, except what was there to take from anyone anymore? "How'd he figure into it?"

"He got rid of them," Lila said simply. "Started chasing people off. Oh, we didn't know it was him at first – and of course, we'd heard a lot of stories about strange things happening, people turning into monsters, but just because it's happened somewhere else doesn't mean you expect to find it right under your nose."

"How'd he chase them off?"

Lila shook her head. Eliot wasn't sure what was distasteful to her, that one of her people had done this horrible thing, or that he'd done it supernaturally. "He conjured up nightmares," Lila said. "Mostly people just packed up and left town, but some of them started going mad. One man killed himself, not fifty feet from here. And madness is dangerous enough in ordinary people."

"Some of those drifters were souped up," Eliot asked.

Lila pressed her lips together. "After a while – I'm not sure what Daniel was driving at," she interrupted herself. "When I first suspected he was behind it, I thought he was trying to protect us from outsiders. But the longer it all went on, the more erratic he became. He chased off most of the drifters, but some of them stuck around, and he would talk to them, constantly, visit them late at night. Then people around town started reporting those same terrible nightmares."

"Maybe the drifters weren't the only ones who started going mad," Eliot said.

"I'm afraid not, since Daniel and his friends tried to burn the town down," Lila told him.

Eliot sighed deeply. "Guess I know where the scorch marks I've been seeing came from," he said finally. "But you stopped them in the end?"

"Barely," Lila said. "And chased them out of town. But it hasn't been easy for us to move on. Things like that can damage your trust in people."

"And this is where me and my sister roll into town," Eliot guessed.

"You must understand why we can't simply welcome you with our arms open and our eyes shut," Lila said. "We can't risk having any unpleasantness."

"Ma'am, it's not my intention to cause trouble," Eliot started.

"So Jackson Cole tells me," she interrupted him. "He's taken a liking to you. But we also can't risk that you've got any secrets hidden away."

Eliot knew he had a damn good poker face. He just hated betting with people's lives. "I don't know how to prove to you that I'm not something I'm not," Eliot told her.

"That's the problem," Lila said.

-

Eliot had a pretty good feeling he knew how things were going to shake out with Parker when he got home, so he took his time walking home.

The walk was nice; the weather was just starting to have a bite to it, and the stars were something else. The extra time didn't end up changing the probabilities at all.

Parker looked at him when he entered, and kept her eyes on him as he walked around the room, taking off his boots and making himself comfortable, but didn't say anything. Didn't even more anything but her eyes.

"Had dinner with Lila in town tonight," Eliot told her.

"I noticed," Parker said. "So when do we leave?"

Eliot dropped into a chair near the fireplace and thought about chopping firewood. It was only going to get colder here on out, and it could be comfortable, sitting in front of a fire.

"You're joking," Parker accused him, sitting up straighter on the couch.

"I just think we shouldn't make any hasty decisions," Eliot said.

"What's to decide?" Parker asked. "They hate me here. They're going to run me out of town like a bad guy in an old movie if they find out about my weird little brain. And you want to stay here and roast samoas?"

"They're called s'mores, Parker."

"Not the point!"

"Well, what is the point?"

"The point is, let's leave," Parker said. "They don't want us here. I don't want to be here. You're the only one who thinks this is a good idea, and you're not the one they're mad at."

"No one is mad at you," Eliot told her.

"Yet. Because they don't know."

"And they aren't going to know. And even if they did, I wouldn't let them do anything to you."

"Why are you fighting so hard for them? Why are we here, for real?" Parker asked him. "You told Lila and the town council we were just here to rest. You told me we were stopping because you were tired of biking. What are we really here for?"

"We're here because people are here," Eliot said. "Isn't that enough? Aren't you tired of being alone?"

"No!" Parker shouted. "I'm tired of this whole stupid world, and I'm tired of these people, and maybe I’m not alone enough."

Eliot felt the fight drain out of him. "Look, if it's between staying here and you going on alone, we don't have to stay here."

Parker's shoulders dropped, too, and Eliot got the distinct impression that she was exhausted. "Good," she said gruffly. "You wouldn't last a day without me."

-

Eliot told Jackson Cole the next morning that he and Parker were planning on moving on.

Cole took it in stride, but asked Eliot to stick around long enough that town could host them a bit of a going away party.

"You sure that's a good idea?" Eliot asked. "Didn't think everyone cared too much for us staying, anyway."

"All the more reason for them to celebrate you're going," Cole said. "And you've done good work here. People appreciate that."

Parker's mood had improved dramatically with the promise they'd be leaving soon, so long as that promise held true, Eliot didn't figure she'd mind staying an extra day or two. "Well, all right then. Never let it be said I turned down some well-meaning hospitality."

So two nights later he and Parker found themselves the guests of honor at a giant bonfire celebration.

The town's stocks for partying weren't what they might have been in other days, but there were some strong drinks passed around that did more to chase off the cold than the bonfire itself.

Parker had a smile on her face and it didn't even look terribly faked, despite the large numbers of people milling around, who kept coming up to talk to them. Eliot stayed close by to make sure nobody went in for a handshake or a hug.

The whole thing might have gone off without a hitch if Lila, Oscar, and some of the town council hadn't come by to add their well wishes to the list. Eliot decided to handle them himself, leaving Parker deep in a conversation with one of the restaurant waitresses.

"It's a shame to see you leaving," Oscar said.

"We ought to be moving on," Eliot replied. "We appreciate what you've done for us, but it's time we found our own place. Might even have some folk waiting around for us back home, who knows? And I reckon it'll be one less thing for you to worry about," he nodded toward Lila.

"It was not my intention to chase you away," she replied. "Or not precisely."

"Still, it must simplify things a bit," Eliot said. "Not having to worry you've got more trouble makers on your hands."

Lila nodded.

Out of the corner of his eye, Eliot saw Parker's head snap away from the woman in front of her and focus directly Oscar.

 _Shit_ , Eliot thought automatically, then tried concentrating harder. _Parker, what's going on?_

Parker didn't look at him, didn't even blink. For the first time in months, Eliot had the idea that Parker couldn't really hear him. He didn't like that that made him feel vulnerable.

Parker started to drift over, eyes still boring into Oscar's head.

Eliot tried stepping into her way, which stopped her forward progress and made her look at him, if only for a second.

"Parker, what are you doing," Eliot whispered.

"I'm mingling," she said between gritted teeth. "It's a party. Isn't that what you do?"

"You look like a shark on the 4th of July," Eliot said, but Parker had already stepped around him.

"Hi, there," Parker said. "Gosh, it's been awhile, hasn't it? _So_ good to see you again."

"It's good to see you again, little lady," Oscar said, way too friendly for whatever it was Parker was leading up to.

"I'm flattered you guys could find the time for little old me and Eliot," Parker said, breaking off her eye contact with Oscar. Since she was looking at each of the town council in turn, with that same burning look in her eyes, it didn't do wonders for Eliot's stress levels. "I know you've got so much to do, keeping this place safe, making sure everyone's on the straight and narrow."

"You know, sis," Eliot said, standing as close to Parker as he thought safe. "I'm sure they are pretty busy, so we should just _let them move on_."

"Nonsense," one of the council said. "It's a party, we're here to relax."

"And you've had such a hard time lately, too," Parker said. "You deserve to relax, after that person Eliot told me about. What was his name? Daniel?"

One of the councilors starting to look uneasy. That was the one Parker zeroed in on.

"No sense bringing up that unpleasantness tonight," Lila said briskly, but this was already spinning out of her control and Eliot thought she could tell that, on some level.

"You're right," Parker smiled. Eliot recognized it as the one she gave a mark right before she cracked their safe. "This is a celebration. You know what? I propose a toast." 

"Parker," Eliot growled, as Parker climbed on top of the pile of firewood. "I don't know if that's a good idea for you, with your condition."

"Come on, Eliot," she told him. "This is a party, we're here to relax. Attention!" she said, pitching her voice louder. The conversations around them subsided as the partygoers turned to look at her. "Sorry I don't have a champagne flute in my hand so I can do that tapping the fork on the glass thing," she said, and received some pleased laughter from the crowd in response.

"As you know, my brother and I are leaving town tomorrow," she said, and a few people boo'd. "And before we go, we wanted to propose a toast to all you wonderful people in Cooperstown."

This caused a round of applause and a few cheers.

"Yes, you are all wonderful people, and you know how I know?" Parker grinned. It was hideous. "Because you're not freaks."

The sounds of merriment died away.

"Oh, sure," Parker continued. "There were some _incidents,_ some _unpleasantness_ , but you all took care of that, didn't you? You rooted out Daniel Higgens and his friends quick enough and you took care of them. 'Chased them out of town,' I like that, that's a nice little euphemism. And I guess they're buried outside town lines, right? Couldn't have any reminders, nope, just had to get the freaks out of the way. Never mind worrying about what they'd _wanted._ Never mind that they didn't _ask_ for anything to happen to them. Never mind that they probably couldn't _control_ what they were doing, and they were _scared_ , and they couldn’t ask anybody for help, I wonder why? I wonder why Daniel Higgins didn't feel like he could trust any of you for help."

"Parker, get down," Eliot said, two seconds away from throwing her over his shoulder and running until his legs broke down.

Parker looked down at him like she didn't see him, but she jumped off the lumber.

The night was so quiet that Eliot couldn't hear anything but her feet on the grass and the crackle of the fire.

"But it was worth it, right?" Parker said, quieter now, but she didn't need to shout; everyone was fixated on her. "Because now you don't have any freaks to worry about."

Quick as Eliot could blink, Parker grabbed a log from the fire by its unburnt end and threw it at a man standing nearby.

People gasped. A couple guys made a move for Parker, but Eliot stared them down.

The guy Parker had targeted threw his hands up, to protect his face.

When the log hit his hands, rather than letting it drop, he closed his fingers around it and held on.

It seemed to be an instinct, rather than a rational thought. And after a few seconds, he hastily dropped it and stepped away. But even as he lowered his hands and thrust them to his sides, Eliot could see that they weren't burnt. They weren't scratched. Hell, they weren't even red from the heat, and his face didn't register any pain – just fear.

"Oops," Parker sang. "Missed one."

"Listen, bitch – " one of the intimidating guys from before stepped forward to shut her up.

"Did you have something you wanted to say?" Parker asked. "Funny, I had a question I wanted to ask you. Why is it that the weather here is always nice, but only if you're in a good mood? Why was there a thunderstorm when you had a fight with your girlfriend?"

The guy froze in his steps. "I didn't – " he started his denial, but too late.

People were starting to whisper and look at him funny.

"Looks like you missed another one," Parker said, rounding on Lila and the town council. "In fact, wow, you guys are kind of bad at this. There's still a whole mess of freaks here in town. There's even one on the _town council_ ," she said, scandalized. "That doesn't sound very safe."

Lila wasn't indulging in any of the whispered conversation, sidelong glances, or muted panic that was going on around her. She was staring Parker down with a cool fury. "Miss Parker," she said. "I'm going to have to ask you to leave town. Immediately."

"Or what?" Parker asked.

"We'll have you shot," Lila replied. Eliot didn't doubt that she meant it.

"Come on, Parker," Eliot said, risking a light touch to Parker's covered elbow. "Let's go."

"Sure. Looks like the party's winding down," Parker said.

The two of them set off, on foot, on the road out of town.

"I hated that bicycle anyway," Parker said lightly.

"Bet you're gonna be singing a different tune in a couple of days," Eliot said.

He badly wanted to talk to Parker, but fuck if he knew what he wanted to say, and fuck if he'd say it where there was any chance anyone from Cooperstown could over hear.

After about a mile, he finally settled on: "It's going to kill them, wondering who's hiding something."

The tiniest, fiercest smile spread over Parker's face. " _Good_."

Eliot very carefully didn't think _I was supposed to be the vindictive one._


	7. October

By October, Eliot was starting to think he'd sympathize with the folks in Cooperstown if he were capable of feeling sympathy toward anyone.

He was getting really, really sick of getting ambushed by people who could levitate or turn into rabbits or light their hair on fire or whatever crap was going to happen next.

Today, there were four guys, and as of yet all Eliot could determine was that one of them glowed in the dark. He wasn't the worst of it, because his two of his buddies – who had apparently been napping when they handed out magical powers – had some serious martial arts training. Eliot focused his attention on them, and let Parker have her merry way with the other two. She'd gotten pretty vindictive about going for people's weak spots. Eliot might have felt sorry about it, but again: no more capacity for sympathy. And when you attack a couple people camped on the side of the road in the middle of the night, you deserve whatever you're getting.

It was all pretty standard until Parker's guys had run off into the night, limping along and making high-pitched yelping noises, and left Parker free to turn and get a good look at Eliot's boxing partners.

She went completely still, in that freak way only someone who routinely worked her way through lasers could.

Eliot got a good hold on one of his opponents and used her to hold off the human night-light. "What is it?"

Parker grabbed the struggling fighter's face and looked her dead in the eyes. She had all the intense energy of an interrogator, except of course she didn't need to ask questions.

Eliot didn't have that advantage. "What's going on?" he demanded.

Parker took off at a dead run.

With a snarl, Eliot smashed the two fighters' heads together and chased after her.

It was a ten-minute run, breathing too hard to make conversation, before Eliot saw what they were looking for.

There was a building on the side of the road. They'd passed it earlier but kept moving, deciding it looked too unstable to camp out in.

It looked just as unstable now, so when Parker rattled the doorknob and found it was locked, Eliot didn't have any trouble kicking the door down.

Parker took off again, into the building.

"Thanks, Eliot," he muttered to himself as he followed her. "You're such a help, Eliot. Let me explain to you where we're going, Eliot."

Parker took a left turn down the hall, after only a second of wavering, and opened the second door they came to.

Eliot followed, because what else was he supposed to do? He sure as hell didn't expect to like whatever they found in there – Parker had her tense unhappy face on – and the world didn't disappoint him.

Of all the people to survive the apocalypse and barge back into Eliot's life, it had to be James Sterling.

"What the hell are you doing here?" Eliot demanded.

The weasel looked smug. He was still wearing a suit and tie, like he was swinging by the office later today – a little shabby for last year's standards, but princely for this day and age.

"Mr. Spencer," he said. "I do believe I should be the one asking that question. And Miss Parker. How good to see you."

It occurred to Eliot that he didn't really know what they were doing here. He'd chased Parker and she'd come running because – why, exactly?

He shot her a glance and she nodded, slightly, in Sterling's direction. So they'd come here for him but...again, why?

Parker rolled her eyes at him before taking over the conversation. "Sterling. We don't appreciate you sending thugs to rough us up."

"Yes, what happened to my agents, exactly?" Sterling asked, before holding up a hand to silence an answer that wasn't forthcoming. "I suppose if they ran afoul of you two, they can't have been too successful. A pity."

"Maybe they shouldn't have jumped us in the middle of the night," Eliot said.

"The regretful necessities of the modern era," Sterling said. "Though if it's any consolation, I didn't send them after you specifically. How could I? I didn't know you were here. They were simply out looking for information. If you'd cooperated, I'm sure things never would have escalated to violence."

"Right, because you always play things by the book," Eliot said.

Sterling raised an eyebrow at him. "As opposed to yourselves?"

"We never had a book to start with," Parker said.

"Hm, well, I suppose my associates can be a bit too eager sometimes," Sterling conceded. "But it's all for a good cause. We are on the trail of some _very_ important information. Funny that they should tell you where to find me, though."

"What information are you looking for?" Parker asked.

"Ah-ah-ah!" Sterling said, wagging his finger like they were kids getting dressed down by a principal, Christ, Eliot hated this guy. "You can't expect me to spoil the surprise just yet."

"Fine," Eliot said. "Don't tell us. Just leave us out of it."

"Departing so soon?" Sterling asked. "Aren't you going to at least stay and have a drink, for old time's sake?"

Eliot snorted. "This place is a dump," he said.

"And we'd hate to be in your way when your company arrives," Parker added.

Sterling steepled his fingers together. "Now that is interesting. I know that my associates didn't tell you I was expecting anyone."

"Maybe they got bigger mouths than you give 'em credit for," Eliot said, because all he could think was _shit._

Parker just looked blasé, which was probably for the best but annoyed Eliot at the same time. It was her damn secret, couldn’t she be concerned about it for one second?

"Perhaps they do," Sterling said. "But they can't have told you something they don't know."

And then he was standing, and stalking across the room, eyes fixed on Parker like he could crack her open just by looking.

So Eliot went with his gut: he threw a solid punch, one that might not solve anything but would probably wipe the smirk off Sterling's face, and would _definitely_ make Eliot feel better.

Or it would have, if Sterling hadn't reached up with one hand and blocked it.

Eliot strained his muscles, but his hand was trapped. Behind him, he heard Parker call out a warning, but he didn't need superpowers to see what was going to happen next.

"You've got to be kidding me," Eliot said, right before Sterling threw him across the room and through a wall.

-

Eliot was a tough guy, but even he couldn't just brush it off and walk away after crashing through a wall and then having most of that wall, plus a good chunk of roof, collapse on top of him.

In fact, he just about held onto consciousness long enough to hear Parker yelling for him, long enough to think _I'm screwed_ , long enough to hear her turn her wrath on Sterling.

 _Least if I die, she'll get him back_ , Eliot thought, and with that he felt comfortable enough to slide off into the darkness.

-

When he woke up he could tell there'd still be hell to pay before he was back on his feet, but he could wiggle all his fingers and toes and he knew, before he even opened his eyes, that Parker was sitting next to him.

"You're not going to die," she told him bluntly.

"Yeah, nice seeing you too," he said. The room around him was tiny, ugly, and not terribly hygienic looking. "Is Sterling dead?"

"Sorry, nope," Parker said. "If you'd actually died I'd have gotten revenge but since you didn't it just seemed like a whole lot of extra work."

"Maybe next time."

"We're a couple miles down the road," Parker told him. "Couldn't get you to a hospital and I don't even know if those exist anymore, but Sterling's friends helped patch you up."

"Oh, Sterling's friends, now I feel better," Eliot said. "That creep still around?"

"Somewhere," Parker said. "Mostly he's off plotting something."

"And we're okay with him sneaking around?" _Knowing about you,_ he didn't say out loud.

"At least this way he's sneaking where we can keep an eye on him," Parker said. "And he's got some things that might be worth listening to."

"If Sterling says it, I'm not interested," Eliot told her.

"You might not have a choice," Parker said. "Unless you think you can get up out of that bed. You're kind of a captive audience right now."

"Yeah, and you got real nice bedside manner, Florence Nightingale," Eliot told her.

Parker pulled his pillow out from under him and thumped it down on his chest.

-

It was a few more hours before Eliot had to summon his patience to deal with Sterling, and by that point, it was almost a relief. Both he and Parker were feeling stir-crazy and that energy just kept feeding on itself.

Parker did fill him in on what'd happened since his injury, but since she hadn't had much contact with Sterling's friends, there wasn't much to tell, and Eliot refused to convalesce while listening to tales of Sterling himself, since the only thing Eliot hated more than a rat bastard was a rat bastard who threw him through a wall.

"You're awake," Sterling said, sauntering into the room.

"Yeah, and I got a favor to repay you," Eliot said.

"I tremble with fear," Sterling replied. "Perhaps this shall teach you a lesson about resorting to violence to solve your problems."

"You used more violence than he did," Parker pointed out.

Sterling smiled. "Anything worth doing is worth doing well."

"Why're you here, Sterling?" Eliot asked.

"Your gratitude is astounding," Sterling answered, and didn't give Eliot a chance to argue that patching someone up after you injured them didn't deserve gratitude. "But very well, I shall move straight toward business, if you prefer. I've been looking for someone, someone who's proved quite elusive. And while you're not exactly my first choice, you do have...skills that could help me find him."

"Because of me?" Parker asked.

"I'm sure that recent developments could make you an even more valuable addition to my team," Sterling said. "But no, those are not the only skills I was referring to."

"Doesn't matter, anyway," Eliot said. "I'm not interested in helping you find anyone."

"You could at least listen to my explanation," Sterling said.

"Why the hell would we listen to anything you have to say?" Eliot growled.

"Because I can help you get what you want."

Eliot scoffed. "You don't even know what we want."

"Of course I do," Sterling answered. "You want what everyone wants; you want things back the way they were. Oh, some people had their fun with the little gifts at first, blowing things up and setting things on fire, but that's all gotten a bit worn out and humanity is just crying out for order. People don't really want power, they want to be able to have a lie down and a snack without being obliterated."

"And you think you can provide that."

"I know who can," Sterling said. "Care to find out?"


	8. November

"Any progress?" Eliot asked as Sterling entered the room he had staked out for himself and Parker.

"Ah, if our search were fueled by your gratitude, we _undoubtedly_ would have found our target by now," Sterling said.

Eliot stared. Sterling had come to him, he didn't have to be polite.

"No progress yet," Sterling said. "Though this would all be much simpler if Parker would cooperate."

"That's Parker's call," Eliot said.

"No," Parker said automatically. She hadn't opened her eyes with Sterling entered the room and was still lying on her back in bed. "I don't like the kind of people you get information from. Their minds aren't nice places to be."

Eliot turned back to Sterling. "There you go, then."

Sterling sighed dramatically. "Then this might just prove to be another dead end."

"You've been real good at finding those." Eliot was getting tired of criss-crossing the countryside on the basis of one rumor some flunkie had heard somewhere.

"If you have a better idea, by all means." Sterling swept out an arm, graciously, but they both knew what the simplest way of finding their target was, and they both knew that wasn't going to happen – at least, Eliot knew, and Sterling claimed to know, though he kept bringing it up over and over again.

"Maybe Eliot could help," Parker said. "He's good at making people tell him stuff."

"Parker – " Eliot started in exasperation.

"You don't have to torture anyone," Parker said. "Just stand around looking scary."

"If you think you can manage that," Sterling added.

"I think I can handle some scare tactics."

Sterling smirked. "I couldn't say; _I_ don't find you particularly intimidating."

Eliot fingers twitched, longing to curl into fists, or wrap themselves around Sterling's neck; _anything_ but have to hang idly as Sterling reminded Eliot that his week in bed recuperating, and his lingering full-body soreness, were his handiwork.

"It's gotta be better than listening to you talk," Eliot said finally.

-

As far as Eliot had gathered, Sterling's new operation – financed by secrets and intimidation and half-truths – had started when he'd realized that some people weren't completely surprised by the new world order.

(Eliot wasn't sure what Sterling did in the very early days, before he realized that. He liked to imagine that Sterling had been at a loss for what to do, but can't quite buy that. The man was always a cockroach.)

So he'd started digging, using methods that he was intentionally vague about, like a magician hiding his damn tricks, until he'd somehow come up with a name: Alfred Emmerich.

When Eliot and Parker had run into Sterling, they'd been forty miles outside Emmerich's hometown and had stumbled into his search for anyone who'd ever known anything about Emmerich: who he was, how he'd been involved, where he was now.

It had been a long search, and not a terribly productive one.

Eliot wasn't sure if the lack of progress had motivated Sterling to start accosting anyone he met, hoping for answers, or if that methodology was the reason for the lack of progress, but he had his guesses.

-

Eliot'd been in more interrogations than he'd care to remember, sitting on both sides of the table, so it didn't take him long to figure out that the poor girl Sterling's guys had found didn't know anything.

He was there to loom, not talk, but he'd never needed words to get his displeasure across, and after a while even the thick-skulled goons Sterling had running the show could pick up on Eliot's mood. They did have the sense not to present a divided front to the target, so instead of kicking him out they called an early halt to the questioning and showed the girl to a second room, where she was bluntly informed she would be staying until they'd decided what to do with her.

"She doesn't know anything," Eliot told the goons. "Just let her go."

"Oh yeah?" one of them demanded. "Last time I checked, you couldn't read minds."

"Last time I checked you didn't have one," Eliot said.

The whole thing ended up getting taken to Sterling anyway. If Eliot couldn't find a way out of running into the bastard several times a day, he was going to have to rethink this whole "working together" thing. He and Parker hadn't been doing so bad on their own.

Hell, who was he kidding. At least Sterling's idiocy gave him something to do.

"Eliot, you were supposed to simplify my life, not complicate it," Sterling admonished.

"Your people are idiots," Eliot said. "And they're badgering some girl who doesn't know anything. How is my scaring her more supposed to simplify anything?"

"She's hiding something," the second goon insisted. "She's shifty."

"She thinks we're going to murder her," Eliot said. "You need to drop the secret agent bullshit, you all suck at it. You'd get better results just knocking on doors and asking politely."

"We did knock on a door," Sterling reminded him. "Alfred Emmerich's door. She was living there."

"She was squatting," Eliot said. "Happens all the time. Parker and I lived in a dead guy's house for a week last month. There aren't any change of address forms anymore, in case you hadn't noticed."

"She could still know something about where Emmerich has gone to," Sterling said.

"You oughta let her go," Eliot said, and turned away.

"Where do you think you're going?" Sterling asked.

"To do the obvious thing," Eliot answered.

-

"Ewww," Parker said, wrinkling her nose. "This place is a dump. Literally, a dump." Then she cocked her head and reconsidered. "No, not literally a dump. Literally a septic tank."

"Just watch where you step and stop talking," Eliot snapped. "The more you talk the more you're going to breathe it in."

The girl who'd been squatting at Emmerich's house had not been the most conscientious visitor, and neither had her friends – one person couldn't have made this much of a mess. There must have been others living here at some point, quite recently, and Eliot wondered where they were. Sterling hadn't brought them in. Maybe he hadn't known about them.

Eliot had sneered at Sterling for not doing a thorough search of Emmerich's house, but given the state it was in, maybe the joke was on Eliot and Parker.

Parker nudged a pile of broken glass, the remains of a tall standing mirror that had fallen and shattered.

"Why'd you think it's bad luck to break a mirror?" she asked.

"Cause no one likes cleaning up broken glass."

"Yeah, but it's not bad luck to break a window."

"Maybe a mirror's just easier to break," Eliot said.

Parker frowned. "Please, nothing is easier than breaking a window. I must have broken a dozen before I was eight." 

Eliot was not going to ask. He wasn't. But. "Play a lot of catch as a kid?"

"No. Why?"

Eliot _wasn't going to ask._ "So how'd they break?"

"Projectiles of different kinds," Parker said, "I jumped through a couple of them, ooh, there's this trick you can do with a vacuum cleaner! Also a lot of them blew out in the explosion."

"Where'd you think Emmerich went?" Eliot said, loudly, because otherwise he was going to keep asking other questions that he really didn't want to know the answers to.

"No idea," Parker said. "But it looks like he packed. Maybe he did know what was coming, after all."

He had packed, that or been robbed. The drawers in the master bedroom weren't completely empty, but they were light on clothes, especially the basics – underwear, socks, shirts. There wasn't anything valuable in the place, except the things that were too large to move easily, including the frame around Parker's broken mirror, which looked like real silver.

There also weren't any photographs.

Eliot tried to tell himself that this was a setback, of sorts, because knowing what Emmerich looked like could have helped them find him. They still didn't know much more about him than his name. But he couldn't get over a weird feeling of relief at not having to see any more half-burned photos of people who were probably dead.

"Do you really think he's dead?" Parker asked, because a man wasn't even allowed a private moment of nerves anymore.

"I don't know," Eliot answered. "Seems like the odds aren't too good on any single individual."

Parker chewed that over for a moment. "Sterling thinks he knew it was coming."

"Yeah, I put a lot of faith in what Sterling thinks."

"He might have been smart," Parker said. "Maybe if he was really smart, he could have made it out."

"Sometimes the other guy's just smarter than you," Eliot said, like Parker even needed the reminder. "Sometimes there's just too many of them."

"Yeah, but, if he was smart. If he got out. He could still be alive. We might find him anywhere. Hiding out, waiting for things to get quiet."

Eliot focused on the room around them. There was something off about it, and damn it, he was going to _find out what it was._ "Things've been quiet for a while," he said slowly. "Even when we were getting the shove in Cooperstown. Even with Court's crowd. There wasn't the same complete upheaval as there was at first. How quiet does it need to be?"

Parker didn't answer. When Eliot snuck a glance over his shoulder, he found that she wasn't looking at him.

"What's wrong with this room?" Eliot said out loud, when the silence was starting to get to him.

That, Parker had an answer to. "The carpet is clean."

-

"I don't like this," Eliot grumbled.

"You've said that about four times now," Parker said. "And you've thought it about another twenty."

"You just know that asshole is going to do something – stupid – awful – " Eliot ran his hands through his hair. It was getting long, even for his tastes. Someone must have a good pair of scissors around, but damned if he'd seen one in months.

"We don't have to tell him," Parker suggested.

That was tempting. But there was every chance in the world that Sterling knew something they didn't about Emmerich, something that he wouldn't come forward with until he had to, and if they couldn't entice him to share by telling him what they'd found in the house, there wasn't any reason to bother with him at all. They might as well just give up on Emmerich entirely.

"Later," Eliot said. "I want to talk to the girl first."

Parker walked him to the room Sterling's men had thrown the poor girl into, but hung back as he looked for a way to open the door.

"Not coming in?" Eliot said, just hoping that he didn't sound annoyed, or angry. It wasn't like Sterling was the only one who realized how convenient it would be to have Parker take over questioning suspects.

She shook her head.

Eliot watched her walk down the hall and turn a corner, vanishing from sight.

He gave up on finding a key anywhere and just forced the door open. There was a frightened yelp from the other side, the sound of someone scurrying away, and he berated himself. No sense in getting pissed off and scaring some kid any worse than Sterling's goons already had.

"Sorry!" he called into the room, leaving the door open just a crack. "Couldn't find a key – thought maybe they'd left it under a doormat, only there ain't any doormat. You okay in there?"

The silence that followed was awfully long, but he could be patient – he was pretty sure he'd _have_ to be patient as possible for the next hour or two of his life. "I'm fine," a high-pitched voice answered, finally. The speaker hadn't moved any closer to him.

"Mind if I open the door the rest of the way?" Eliot said. "Only I have a few questions for you and I hate not being able to see the person I'm talking to."

What exactly he'd do if she said _no_ , he wasn't sure, but that didn't come up.

"Okay," she said, after another long pause. "Okay, you can come in."

Eliot swung the door open slowly and gently as if he was showing off his chivalry on a first date. "Hey there," he said, spotting the girl. She had backed up against the opposite wall, pushing her back right up against it, like she might launch off it to attack him. And maybe she would. She was about fifteen years old and tiny, but the last few months had taught an awful lot of people an awful lot of nasty tricks – especially the people who hadn't been handed down any special skills they could defend themselves with. "We met the other day – didn't catch your name, though. I'm Eliot."

The girl looked him up and down – for a weapon, or a trap of some kind, or just for sheer curiosity. She licked her lips. "Katie," she said.

"Katie," he said. "Thanks for letting me in."

"You kicked down the door."

Eliot smiled and shrugged. "Used my shoulder, actually," he said. "Wasn't such a stubborn door. They usually aren't, when they're interior doors like this."

Katie crossed her arms. "I wouldn't know."

"The trick is, you aim at the edge, here, see?" Eliot ran his hands along the door to show her. "Movies, they always kick the door right in the middle. Stupid thing. Next time you're locked in a room you don't want to be in, you remember that. Or sometimes you can just break the hinges and pop the door off."

The suspicious teenager didn't know what to do with this turn of events. "Break down a lot of doors, do you?"

"Me, I've got a habit of sticking my nose places that people don't want me to," Eliot said. "Like that house you've been staying in."

" _God_ , would you guys just let that go already?" Katie said. Apparently she was too annoyed to act afraid of him anymore, because she dropped from her defensive stance on the wall and plunked herself down into a chair. "I don't know anything about the stiff that lived there. I only found this place a few months ago, and I only stayed cause it seemed like less trouble than leaving. If I'd known you all were going to come harass me I wouldn't have bothered. It's not even worth it, the place was a dump before I even got there."

Eliot let her vent. He even nodded along and put on a sympathetic face. Katie needed a friend more than she needed threats right now. Maybe that was the flaw in Sterling's strategy. Everyone these days was so used to feeling unsafe, scare tactics were hardly even worth noticing.

"I believe you," Eliot said. "Every sign we have says Emmerich left town before any of this even went down." No need clarifying what 'this' was that had gone down. "But you haven't been totally honest with us, have you, Katie?"

Katie glared at him in sullen defiance as only a teenager could. "You're the ones who are liars. Those guys said they'd let me go."

"Tell you what, Katie, end of this little conversation we're having, I'll let you out myself," Eliot said. "Won't even make you break down any doors, I'll hold them open for you."

"Oh right, like you won't just keep me here if you don't get what you want."

"I promised, now, and I don't break that kind of promise," Eliot told her. "There's a catch, though, which is that this conversation doesn't end until you tell me the truth. Now, I feel great, I could sit here all day and all night and not get tired, and frankly everyone in this building is driving me insane right now so sitting in here getting away from all them sounds pretty good to me. I'm guessing you'd much rather just get it over with so you can be going. But it's up to you."

Katie shifted in her chair, like she'd just realized how uncomfortable it was. "I didn't lie," she insisted.

"You didn't tell us about the other people living in Emmerich's house, though," Eliot said. "How many were there?"

Katie stared him down for a long, long while, but he'd played this game with hit men and psychos and military despots, and eventually she looked away. "Three," she said. "I didn't know two of them too well, they left pretty soon after I got there. I think they were just passing by, same as me. But Jason – " She cut herself off, her cheeks turning pink, and glared up at Eliot, defiantly.

Eliot kept his face in the same genial, polite expression he'd had all along, but inside he sighed. Things got so complicated when people were in love with each other. And no one in the world could be in love with someone quite so fanatically as a teenager.

"How'd Jason know Emmerich?" Eliot asked.

Katie sat bolt upright. "I didn't say he did."

"You said the others were just passing by, but Jason wasn't. So he had a reason for being there. I'm just assuming he knew Emmerich, maybe he was there to rob the place – "

"He'd never!" she said, but caught her temper quickly. "You're being sneaky," she told him. "You come in here pretending to be nice but you're worse than those other guys."

Eliot sighed. So much for that strategy. "Katie, we found the files under the carpet."

Katie crossed her arms and shut her mouth and wouldn't say another word to Eliot no matter how he prodded her.

At least, not until he stood to leave.

"You said you'd let me go."

He looked back at her.

"Conversation's not over," he said.

The downside of breaking a door was that you couldn't close it back up after you. Eliot walked halfway down the hallway and leaned up on a wall, one eye on Katie's room. They were in an abandoned office building now, and he could just move her to the room next door. But he'd rather leave her to think for now, and he'd never been happy about having her locked up in the first place.

Sterling found him after about ten minutes.

"You've been holding out on me," he said.

"Like you haven't," Eliot said.

"Such animosity," Sterling sighed. "You know, I'd rather hoped we could put aside whatever differences we'd had in the past. That was such a long time ago, don't you think the reasonable thing to do now is to cooperate?"

Eliot didn't even bother to look at Sterling. "So you tell me what you really know about Emmerich."

"Perhaps it is time we share."

"Once I got something solid, we can talk about it," Eliot said. "Though any conversation going to have to start with why the hell you bothered to invite us along just to hide shit from us."

"Caution is a virtue. You never have to worry about taking back something if you didn't say it in the first place."

"Yeah, answer for everything." Eliot shifted his weight. His body wanted to threaten Sterling, and had to keep being reminded that there wasn't much he could to do hurt Sterling now. Not physically, anyway. And that put him in a bad mood all over again. "Get lost, you'll probably scare her off."

"I leave the girl in your competent hands," Sterling said, making it sound like he was doing Eliot a big favor by letting him do all the work.

Why the hell was Eliot doing all the work anyway?

That was it, he thought as he watched Sterling depart. He was getting Parker and getting the hell out of here. They were just wasting their time on some stupid wild goose chase –

"Hey," Katie said, subdued, from the doorway. "Did you really find something at the house?"

"Yeah," Eliot said. "Yeah, we did."

Katie crossed her arms, uncrossed them, and crossed them again. "What was it?"

"Don't you know?" Eliot asked.

Katie hesitated before shaking her head. "He wouldn't show me," she said. "And then he was gone and I thought about looking – but I wasn't supposed to. It didn't – it didn't say where he went or anything, did it?"

Eliot shook his head.

"Oh."

"You want to tell me about this guy?" Eliot asked. "Can't find him if we don't know who he is."

"You aren't really going to look for him."

"We're looking for Emmerich. _If_ he knew Emmerich, we might find him, too."

"Okay," Katie said. "Okay, but I'm leaving this room."

Eliot gestured down the hallway. "Fair enough."

-

"So?" Sterling asked, once more settling himself in Eliot's room like he owned the place. "I assume you've found out something useful, since you let the girl go."

"We didn't have any business keeping her here in the first place," Eliot said. "I just held the door open."

"Yes, about that. There are so few buildings in this town that are still in one shape, why _exactly_ did you feel you had to lay waste to this one?"

"Breaking things is what Eliot does best," Parker chirped.

Eliot knew he didn't react, because his poker face had done a lot more than just win him games of poker. But Parker was looking right at him, and Sterling was looking right at _her_ , and apparently a man can't have secrets anymore.

"Sorry," Parker muttered.

"Did you read the damn files?" Eliot asked her.

"I opened them, and I looked at them," Parker said. "It's mostly a lot of science. Not the kind that helps fry security cameras or re-direct laser beams either, so it's not really in my wheelhouse."

"It's gotta be important, or they wouldn’t have hidden it."

"They who?" Sterling asked. "And hidden what? You're holding out on me."

"You started it," Eliot said. "So come clean. Who's Emmerich and why're we looking for him?"

"You have _such_ a distressing lack of imagination," he sighed. "Emmerich is the reason we are where we are today."

"Yeah, I figured. But why exactly are we looking for him?" Eliot asked.

Sterling blinked, like Eliot had actually managed to disturb his self-involved calm. "Isn't it obvious?" he asked.

"Oh, would you both just _shut up_ ," Parker said. "'Oh, I'm a big tough guy, I don't answer questions.' 'Oh, I'm a big tough guy too, I don't even _ask_ questions, I just snap and glare.' 'I'm snappier than you are!'" She threw her hands up in disgust while Sterling and Eliot eyed each other uneasily, both trying to figure out which one of them Parker was madder at. "You could just talk. Since neither of you knows anything, it isn't even like you'd have to talk to each other very long."

She turned to Eliot. "Eliot, Sterling thinks that Emmerich is the one who caused the superpowers, and he wants Emmerich to change it back." She looked at Sterling. "Sterling, Eliot and I found some of Emmerich research at his house, though it's not like we can read it and it's not a recognized currency in any nation on Earth, so I'm not sure why that's supposed to be exciting. Also that girl you found knew a guy who knew Emmerich, but he vanished into thin air so Eliot let her go because what else was she going to do for us?"

"That's an...adequate summation of events, I suppose," Sterling said. "It does lack the flair I would have given it."

"I thought that was a little too much flair," Eliot said, eying Parker carefully but not stepping toward her. She was looking at the ceiling now, which her cheeks puffed out in annoyance, and he didn't think a pat on the back would exactly help her mood. "You really think this Emmerich guy can change things back?"

"If anyone could, it's probably the man who caused it."

"You really think that's a good idea?"

Parker's cheeks deflated, and Sterling looked surprised again. Apparently, while physical intimidation was off the table, Eliot could still throw Sterling off his game by implying that his plans weren't foolproof.

Arrogant asshole.

"In case you haven't noticed, the world as we know it has more or less ended," Sterling said slowly, like Eliot was a little kid. "Generally speaking, people aren't in favor of that."

"People made the world what it is," Eliot said. "And I don't think the genie's gonna go back in the bottle as easily as you're hoping."

"So why are you here?" Sterling asked. "Aren't you supposed to fight for people who can't fight for themselves? Or have you just been waiting for an opportunity to undermine my operation?"

"Don't flatter yourself. I've just been so bored I need anything to do." Eliot tried to believe it. It's what he'd been telling himself all along.

Sterling didn't buy it, but who cared.

Parker didn't buy it, and wouldn't even look in his direction.

"Here's your damn files," Eliot said, handing over the papers they'd found in Emmerich's house. "They aren't going to do you any good, but they're no use to me. You can have them and choke on them."

"Charming," Sterling said, but his hands clasped the files, just short of being a grab, and he wasted no time in flipping through it.

Eliot smirked a little as confusion flickered in Sterling's eyes.

"Told you," he said.

Sterling snapped it shut. "No matter. If you can't do something yourself, find an expert. There are still people in the world who can tell what this means, even if Emmerich can't be located."

"Good luck," Parker snorted.

"I take it this means our involvement has ended?" Sterling asked.

Eliot shrugged. This ball was in Parker's court, now; his game was up.

Parker shrugged, as well. "I'm tired," she said suddenly. "I need a nap." When Eliot and Sterling failed to move, she flapped her hands at them. "Shoo, shoo. You're keeping me awake."

-

Eliot slowly opened the door later that night. Hearing Parker's rhythmic breathing, he crept into the room and fell into his bed, making himself fall asleep.

-

Eliot knew, in the moment between waking up and opening his eyes, that the room was empty.

It didn't take him long to figure out where Parker had gone, either.

It was a small town, with few tall buildings, and most of them had suffered some damage in the last few months. Eliot found the tallest one still standing and started climbing stairs.

Parker was on the roof, standing right on the edge.

A voice in his head whispered that if she fell, he couldn't catch her.

She turned around, and he knew the voice was whispering in her ears now, too.

"Hey, Parker," he said.

"Hey, Eliot." He didn't think she'd looked straight at him for this long since she'd changed.

He walked right up to the edge and stood next to her like it was something he did every day, like his survival instincts weren't screaming at him to get back, get off the roof, get himself to a bunker and wait this whole thing out. "You going to bed soon?"

"It's quiet out here."

Eliot shrugged. "We could sleep out here. But we'd need to step away from the edge first."

Parker stayed put. She was still watching him like she'd never seen him before. He knew what _he_ was thinking, but had no idea what she was making of it.

"You going to let me in on what's going on in there?" he asked.

Parker looked away, finally.

"I liked it better," she said. "Before."

They stood several moments, statues in an empty world, before Eliot sighed. "Yeah," he wrapped an arm around Parker. "Me too."


	9. December

Sterling had found them horses, of all things, to help them move between cities.

Whatever goodwill he might have built up with Eliot through this was completely destroyed by the obvious-after-two-seconds fact that Sterling didn't have the least idea what to _do_ with a horse. Or that they weren't cars, and had to stop to take breaks.

Though it could have been worse. At least he knew how to ride, decently enough. Only thing Eliot could think that'd be worse than riding with Sterling was riding with Sterling who couldn't stay in his saddle.

"Didn't sign on to give pony rides," Eliot muttered under his breath.

Parker slapped him on the shoulder, hard enough to hurt. "Can you do balloon animals?"

Eliot scowled. She hadn't been making life easier, either, given her refusal to get within fifteen feet of a horse. At least she could keep up well enough on foot; they weren't exactly running in a derby.

"We're making good time," she said.

"Good time to nowhere."

"Maybe the tip is solid."

They'd had word that Katie's mysterious "Jason," who seemed to know Emmerich, had been heading for a small town near the Great Lakes, so they'd turned north. Already, the weather was getting miserable.

Worse than the cold was the feeling that they were chasing ghosts. Assuming Katie hadn't lied to him, and assuming she hadn't misunderstood the vague things Jason had told her, it seemed likely that Jason had known Emmerich at some point. That didn't mean he knew where Emmerich was. Or that they'd find Jason. Or that Emmerich would even be any good to them.

"I think we shouldn't get our hopes up."

"What hopes? I'm just along for the ride."

"You're walking."

Parker rolled her eyes. "It's an _expression_."

Eliot figured, given two hours, he could break Parker of this whole fear of horses thing.

Maybe three hours, and the world's most cooperative horse.

Maybe he could just throw her onto a horse's back and let nature take its course.

He chuckled under his breath as he pictured that.

The bug-eyed look on Parker's face told him that she was enjoying the same mental image he was. "Enjoying" being an expression, of course.

"I wouldn't really do it," he said. "Wouldn't be fair to the horse."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Parker said, and stomped off.

-

Time was, Eliot didn't slog through snow to knock on people's doors like a vacuum cleaner salesman. It'd been a nice life. Now it felt like all he knew was frozen feet and standing, forever, waiting for families long gone to come open their front doors.

Of course, vacuum cleaner salesmen got to just take off when no one answered. Eliot'd broken through more doors and windows in the last week than he'd even walked through before, seemed like.

And every house was the same. Whatever scared off the folks that'd lived here, it hadn't been anything flashy like fire or earthquakes or tornadoes. The buildings were in fine condition, the furniture and possessions inside laid out like their owners'd be coming back for them any minute now.

It was a ghost town in the truest sense of the word. If it weren't so frozen outside, Eliot would've expected to see tumbleweeds. There weren't words for how much he despised it.

He wasn't sure whether Parker was giving him space or he was giving Parker space, or if it was just faster to search the town separately, but they split up every morning and didn't meet back up until nightfall.

Sterling had his own separate route, but there wasn't any ambiguity there; he was as tired of Eliot's company as Eliot was of his, if that was even possible, and said so, emphatically, on more than one occasion.

He never seemed to tire of Parker's company, which was a thing Eliot didn't even want to have to remind himself not to think about, but Parker could handle herself. She was as good as ever at scaring people away. Her latest tactic in unnerving her companions was to act aggressively normal.

"Hello Eliot, Sterling," she chirped, as they met up to go over the progress, pathetic as it was, of the day. "How was your day?"

"Surely you know," Sterling said, disbelief in his voice.

"Well I assume that if you had any big news, you'd have told me," she said blithely. "But you know what happens when you assume things!"

Eliot squinted at her. Maybe there was some kind of cold-weather mirage affecting his vision. And hearing.

"Though actually," Parker said. "No one ever actually told me what happens when you assume things. They'd just say, 'you know what happens when you assume things.' But I'm guessing it's not good."

"No, not good," Eliot said.

"See?" Parker smiled at them. Sterling took a step backward, and Eliot couldn't even blame him for it.

"Parker, you got a fever or something?"

"Nope, I'm fit as a fiddle!" She started pouring herself a glass of water. "I found a fiddle in a guy's house today. And some kind of mini-guitar. Maybe a banjo. You find anything interesting?"

And she was really asking. Trying to keep a conversation going out loud.

"No," he said, because whatever game she was playing, he might as well play along. "Lot of books, clothes. Some souvenirs. Can't blame people for traveling away from here."

"Surely this town must have been livable once," Sterling said. "Or at least more interesting than it is now."

"Metal rusting is more interesting than this town."

"Have you ever watched metal rust?" Parker asked. "It might be more interesting than you think."

Sterling smiled, like it caused him pain to do so. "I suppose you would have a higher threshold than most for surveillance."

"On account of how many pieces of art she's stolen away from people like you?" Eliot asked. "All that sitting around, watching for the security guard shift changes, patterns in the laser grid..."

"Yes, thank you Mr. Spencer for elaborating." Sterling's not smiling face looked just as pained as his smiling face. Eliot felt tired just watching his expressions.

"That kind of work does come in handy sometimes," Parker said, then laughed at them when they didn't get it. "Because we're doing surveillance right now?"

"I defer to your expertise on the matter."

Eliot just grunted. The waiting was always the longest part of a mission, but he could usually get through it because he knew that he'd need it if he was going to have any chance of being successful.

This, though, felt an awful lot like chasing his tail. He was surprised at Parker's patience; he'd have thought she'd have been itching at this even worse than he was. Or maybe she really was being strung along by hope, hope that they could find Emmerich, hope that he could undo -

Eliot interrupted his own train of thought, silently cursing himself for letting his mind get away from him.

Almost against his will, his eyes darted to Parker.

And found her humming to herself, playing with her food and looking just as uncomfortably cheery as she'd been a second ago.

Maybe his slip up wasn't so critical. Or maybe Parker had gotten better at keeping her feelings to herself.

Somehow, neither of those ideas sat quite right with Eliot.

-

It was two more days of living with Stepford Parker and an increasingly irate Sterling before Eliot figured it all out.

He was slogging through another slushy suburban road when an ear-piercing whistle caught his attention. He recognized it, of course. He'd told Parker off more than once for making that damn sound indoors, or right next to his ear.

It was only a few blocks to find Parker looking like a little kid on Christmas, bundled up in thick outer clothes and bouncing around like she'd just seen Santa.

"Find something in there?" he called as he got nearer, pointing toward the house.

"Not inside," Parker said, grabbing for him with both gloved hands.

She dragged him around the side of the building just as he saw Sterling turning a corner. Sterling never did move any faster than a stroll.

Eliot didn't have to ask what had got Parker so excited. The house's backyard edged on a wooded area, and right at the border of it, two trees had been felled and chopped into firewood. Inexpertly, and _recently._

"Someone was here," Eliot said.

Parker nodded.

"Must've been yesterday," he continued. "Snowed the night before that."

Parker nodded again.

"So where're they holed up, and why haven't they come out to say hello?" Eliot asked, but he wasn't really thinking about either of those. He was thinking about Emmerich. There was no reason that this had to be Emmerich, but if it was, if it _was_...

Parker sat, with a heavy thump, on the nearer tree stump.

Eliot's focus snapped to her. He'd thought her paleness was because of the cold, the tension in her face from anticipation. Now he wasn't sure.

"I'm fi – " she started to answer, then cut herself off.

Sterling would choose that moment to finally grace them with his presence. Eliot had half a mind to chuck him into the woods.

At least the man wasn't stupid. He took half a look at the scene and said, "If someone's chopping firewood, someone will be burning firewood."

"Somewhere nearby," Eliot said. Sterling was searching the skyline over the trees and not looking at Parker, who'd taken a breath and stood back up.

Parker was watching the sky now, too, her back to Eliot.

Eliot crossed his arms – he hated these tricks – and very clearly thought _Parker._

No response.

_PARKER._

Nothing.

Eliot shifted his weight, feeling dumb and guilty at the same time, and thought, _Parker, LOOK OUT._

Out loud, those words and that tone would have had anyone in a hundred feet dropping to their feet first and asking questions later.

Parker didn't even twitch.

Now she had him feeling crazy for trying to talk with his mind, and for feeling _bad_ when it failed. A man ought to be glad of a little privacy.

Sterling broke up Eliot's thoughts. "We're too close to the trees. Let's fall back and find a better vantage point."

Sterling led the way, Parker chatting with him about where best to keep look out. Eliot followed, too preoccupied to chime in.

-

"You're supposed to be looking out for smoke," Parker told him. "And find your own tree. This is my tree."

It was Parker's tree because no one else on Earth would ever climb it. It looked like a light spring breeze would send it toppling over. Eliot had no idea how it supported Parker's weight, but he wasn't going to shout twenty feet up in the air to talk to her, so he clung to the trunk of it and didn't go any higher than he needed to.

"How'd you shut my thoughts out of your head?" Eliot had limited patience with small talk even at the best of times.

"I can't tell you," Parker sniffed.

"Parker."

"Eliot."

" _Parker_."

"El-i-ot."

She really might not have told him, at all, except that Eliot fell out of the tree.

The branch he was resting on cracked, and his grip slipped before he could shift over to a different one. The fall didn't hurt, much, just knocked the wind out of him and smarted his pride.

Parker fell-jumped-slid out of the tree because that was what she'd been doing since she was in diapers, probably, and landed next to him. "Are you okay?" she asked. "Because if you're broken, Sterling's going to get really snotty about helping you."

Eliot wheezed and nodded.

"Did you do that on purpose?"

He caught back just enough air to say, "You should know."

Parker sat down and started playing with some broken off twigs that had been casualties of his descent. "I've never known why anyone does anything," she said. "That worked for me."

"'S different now."

"Maybe it doesn't have to be," she shrugged. "Court had some people that seemed pretty in charge of what they could do."

Eliot could muster up a full response to that. "Court's people were _psychopaths_."

"Well, yeah, but it still worked."

Feeling mostly recovered, he pushed himself up into a sitting position. "Parker, you haven't been yourself lately."

She snorted.

"And you looked like death earlier, when we found the firewood. Whatever you're doing, it isn't going well for you."

"You don't _know_ that, for sure."

"Maybe not."

Parker threw a twig at him. He batted it away with one hand.

"Sterling's brain is boring," she told him. "I thought at least he'd been slimy or awful but he's just – boring."

"Deal with it," Eliot said. "God, if you need a break, just take a break. Get some air. You don't need to kill yourself with this nonsense."

Parker pulled a face, but before they could talk any further, her eyes popped open and her hand flew up to point.

He knew before he'd even looked that she was pointing at a thin column of smoke rising up in the air.

-

Sterling had seen it too, or else he'd heard Parker's victorious whoop, because he met up with them at the tree line.

"Who – " he started, as Parker plunged in amidst the foliage.

"How should we know?" Eliot snarled.

Sterling glared at him in return as they followed Parker. Eliot found himself falling behind the others; Parker had a head start, and Sterling was faster than he had any right to be. Must help that he could push off the ground that much harder now, Eliot thought. He caught up with them just in time to see Sterling kick through the backdoor of a house.

"Have to make a big show of everything," he muttered.

Sterling spared him a glance. "I'm sorry, is the man who taught a teenage girl how to break down doors giving me a lecture on subtlety?"

Eliot gestured inside, where the door had snapped in half, flown off its hinges, and knocked over the kitchen table. He didn't want to stress the point, though, because Parker had pushed on ahead of them.

They'd checked two rooms in the house before Eliot got the feeling that something was wrong. He grabbed for Parker but missed her, so he settled for flinging an arm out to stop Sterling from going any further.

"You smell smoke?" he asked.

"We are looking for a fire," Sterling answered slowly.

"And there's the fireplace." Eliot nodded to the undisturbed appliance. 

Sterling paused, but wasn't completely convinced. "There could be others."

"Guys!" Parker stuck her head back in the room. "Upstairs, come on!"

Eliot pushed ahead of Sterling. Parker took one look at his face and hung back to let him take the lead.

There was no need to poke around here; a trail of smoke was sneaking out under a door on the left. Eliot placed his hand on the door, and finding it wasn't warm, pushed it open a crack.

Then he swore, threw it open the rest of the way, and charged in.

The fire wasn't in a fireplace; it was chewing up one side of the room, starting from a filing cabinet and crawling up the walls and across the carpet.

That wasn't the most alarming part.

The most alarming part was the figure, laying prone on the floor, with his head bashed in.

It didn't take Eliot more than a second to be sure the man was dead. But they had time before the fire caught him, and the man hadn't hit himself over the head. He had to take a closer look.

He rolled the stiff over – he'd been dead for a day, at least – and heard Sterling spitting out words he'd figured the other man was too dignified to use.

"You got a problem?" Eliot asked. "Or just don't like getting your hands dirty."

Sterling's eyes blazed. "We _all_ have a problem," he said. " _That_ is Alfred Emmerich."

"Not anymore," Eliot said grimly. "Get his feet."

"He's dead."

"And someone made him that way. After the hell I've been through looking for him, I'd like to know who. Get his feet."

Sterling gave him one more glare before he hoisted Emmerich's uncooperative form up, easily, with one hand.

Right. Long as Sterling was happy to do the work, Eliot was happy to let him. "Parker," he said, raising his voice a pinch. The fire wasn't big yet, but it was plenty noisy already.

"On it," she said, and he turned just in time to see her enter the room holding a fire extinguisher like a shotgun in a bad action movie.

She lay waste to the fire as gleeful as a kid at a carnival, but Eliot didn't let that distract him. He started to head out.

"And where are you going?" Sterling asked, striving for a nonchalant look as he lifted a corpse up to shoulder level.

"We came here tracking firewood," Eliot pointed out. "I don't know about you, but I don't see any firewood."

Sterling blinked. "Parker, finish this up quickly and catch up with us, will you?"

She whooped.

Sterling and Eliot caught each other's eyes and shrugged.

They cleared the rest of the second floor and found nothing suspicious.

"Would you go put the dead guy down?" Eliot asked.

"Does he make you nervous?" Sterling replied.

"He smells bad," Eliot pointed out. "And there's no point in keeping him to look for evidence if you're just going to bang him into every doorway we pass."

"I don't care to misplace him. I've put in just as much work as you have to finding him – more, if you'll recall."

"Fine, then, just keep your souvenir out of my way."

Sterling switched Emmerich from one hand to another like he was a piece of luggage. "Easily managed. Now do tell, what are we looking for?"

"You set a fire in the room because that's what you need to make sure burns," Eliot thought out loud. "But if you're really worried about someone coming looking, you make sure the whole house goes up. You suppose this place's got a furnace?"

Sterling pursed his lips. "Basement."

Eliot led the way here, too, because Sterling was still carrying around his morbid trophy.

He moved quietly into the dark. The reek of smoke hit his nose as he climbed down the basement stairs, but not, this time, from fire. There was a voice in the dark, muttering, cursing.

Eliot stopped to let his eyes adjust, but there was precious little light to see by, and a dull clatter told him the mutterer was stacking firewood.

He descended on the stranger like a ghost. "Drop it."

The mutterer turned on him and lashed out, but he was moving by instinct, not training, and he was kneeling near the ground. Eliot got a good hold on him, wrapped him tight so he couldn't strike out again, and felt for his hands.

"You know what trouble you could cause playing with matches?" he asked.

"I didn't – I won't tell anyone, I swear, this never happened, just let me go," the man babbled in a hoarse voice.

"Oh, you're going to tell," Sterling said cruelly. "You're going to tell us why you killed Emmerich."

"I didn't – "

"Bring him up," Sterling commanded. "I want to see his face."

Eliot glared at Sterling – not that he could see – but it wasn't like he wanted to hang out in a clammy basement. Beside, he wanted to check on Parker.

The man didn't want to climb up the stairs, but Eliot could be very persuasive, and it wasn't long before they emerged back into the living room, which seemed suddenly cheerful for all that it was dusty and uninhabited.

"Parker," Eliot called.

Her face appeared at the top of the stairs. "What?"

"You get that fire out?"

She gave him two thumbs up, while still holding the extinguisher.

"Then come down and say hello to our guest."

She raced down the stairs.

In talking to her, Eliot had released his captive, who had turned and caught sight of Sterling. He went pale and started babbling again. "Please, don't kill me, I didn't even know about any of it, I swear."

"God's sake, Sterling, put the dead guy down," Eliot chided. "You're already a creepy fuck."

Sterling placed Emmerich on a recliner. Eliot wasn't sure if that was better or worse than returning him to the ground.

"You're in a very strange position for a man who claims not to know anything," Sterling said.

"I don't!"

He looked so pathetic that Eliot almost wanted to believe him, just so he could wash his hands of him. "Why're you trying to burn the place down, then?"

"Look, nothing good is going to come of – any of it. You see that. So just – I won't do anything, I couldn’t do anything to you if I wanted to. Just let me go."

Eliot had a thought. "Hang on, d'you think _we_ killed Emmerich?"

"Well, _obviously_ ," the guy said, before the wisdom of condescending to suspected murderers could work its way through his skull.

"Hang on, no," Sterling said. "He's trying to confuse us."

"I don't know," Parker shrugged. "Sounds like he's scared pretty shitless of us."

"And you _know_ this?" Sterling asked.

She shook her head.

Eliot and Sterling scowled at her, both mad she was blocking out the stranger's thoughts. Agreeing with Sterling made Eliot's skin crawl, though, so he turned his attention back to their arsonist.

"You know this guy?" Eliot asked.

The man shook his head, unconvincingly.

"You know, you do sound an awful lot like someone I heard about recently," Sterling said. "That lab assistant, what was his name? The one your friend told us about, Eliot."

Eliot nodded. "Jason."

He hoped that Jason never played poker. The man flinched so obviously that Eliot almost felt pained by it himself.

"So. That's the second lie you've told us in two minutes of association," Sterling said. "I think you'll find I don't appreciate being lied to."

And Sterling was on Jason before Eliot could move to interfere, if he'd even wanted to. Jason wound up on the ground with Sterling digging a knee into his back and grabbing hold of his arms.

"Let's try this again," Sterling said. "What happened to Emmerich."

"I don't know!" Jason said. "I just found him that way."

"Yeah, and I guess he just fell and hit his head tying his shoes one day," Eliot said. "What was the fire for, did the old man always want a Viking funeral?"

"I just – " Jason squirmed, but there was no getting out of Sterling's hold, not for a weakling like him. "Look, you obviously think his research was too dangerous. I just didn't want any of it causing more trouble."

"Think you missed the boat on that one," Eliot said. "By about nine months, actually."

"It's not like I knew what he was up to," Jason said. "Not at first. And then he spooked and ran here and I was just – checking up on him. Except you guys got here first."

"You're mistaken," Sterling said. "We didn't arrive until after you set your fire."

"Then who killed him?" Parker asked.

Every set of eyes – even Jason's, an inch from the floor – darted around the room. Like someone was going to be hiding in the fucking shadows behind the entertainment system.

"He's been dead for a day," Eliot said. "Day and a half, maybe. They might be long gone."

"Why didn't they take the research?" Sterling muttered.

"Maybe they did," Eliot said. "You sure you torched everything, kid?"

"How should I know?" Jason said. "He never showed me anything important."

"Wonderful," Sterling said. "Our mastermind is dead, his work is scattered, charred, or stolen, and all we are left with is this moron."

Jason was about to object to that before he remembered that the person who said it could easily break his spine. He shut his mouth.

Eliot felt a little sorry for the kid. Hell, it was hard to hate anyone who got a pounding from Sterling. "What're you doing here, kid?" he said. "Last we heard, you were working in Emmerich's lab until you up and vanished."

"Didn't do such a good job of vanishing, did I?" Jason said gloomily. "If you could follow me."

"Answer the question," Sterling said. "Before we start wondering how much you know of Emmerich's research."

"I don't know shit," Jason snapped, looking as unnerved as hell. Well, Sterling was holding him down with one hand, looking bored all the while. It wouldn't have taken a genius to recognize the threat of what he could do if he was really trying. "If you think that Emmerich told me anything important, you're crazy. I know it wasn't – it wasn't supposed to happen yet, it all went wrong somehow. Emmerich thought someone had interfered with his work. Maybe he as right, I don't know. But he split, he didn't even tell me where he was going. He didn't tell me _anything_."

"You were working for him," Eliot said. "Figure'd he'd keep you in the loop."

"That paranoid old bastard? He didn't even put his first name on his business cards, he didn't like people knowing that much about him. I graduated first in my class and he had me organizing his planner and ordering supplies, because he didn't want me to know what he was working on."

"You found him here," Parker pointed out. "And you had a copy of his work." Her face was getting paler by the second. Eliot wanted to tell her to leave. There was no reason for her to be here if she didn't want to read his mind. "You were living in his house, with his research, and you followed him here."

"I took some stuff from his lab, after he left," Jason admitted. "Most of it he took himself, but I found some copies. I didn't know what it was."

"You worked for the man for a year and didn't know what he was working on?" Sterling asked. "I find that...unlikely."

From the way Jason winced, Sterling had followed this observation with an increase in pressure, though subtle enough that Eliot didn't catch it happening. "I didn't think he was turning people into monsters," Jason said.

"Language," Sterling admonished, and Jason flinched again.

"I didn't know he was – doing this. When he skipped town, I got bored. I thought I'd read his files just to see what he'd been up to. And then – when I knew what it was, that he'd done _all this_ , I thought, I had to see."

"How'd you find him up here?" Eliot asked.

"I asked his guy," Jason said.

"His 'guy'." Sterling couldn't have sounded less impressed. "Please, do elaborate."

"His guy, his helper," Jason babbled.

"Thought that was your job," Eliot pointed out.

"I was his assistant – I called people, I ordered supplies, I answered his fucking email. Big day came, none of that meant anything anymore. But Emmerich was still doing his research, for a while, so he found a guy who could help him out. Get him things he needed. Played by the new rules."

"This guy got a name?"

"None that I heard. But when Emmerich was really starting to spook, thinking someone was going to come after him," Jason shot a dirty look at Sterling, best he could with half his face in the dirt, "this guy said he knew a place Emmerich could go. Invited me along but I didn't want to go, yet."

"You seen this guy before the day?" Eliot asked.

"No," Jason said. "And he didn't show up for a month or so afterward, either."

"If Emmerich was such a suspicious bastard," Sterling said. "Why did he trust this drifter with no name?"

Jason moved, awkwardly. Eliot wasn't sure if it was a shrug or if Sterling was trying to jog his memory again. "Guy was a smooth talker," Jason said. "And one of Emmerich's friends set them up. Fuck, man, I had _other things on my mind_ at the time."

"Like Katie?" Parker asked.

Jason stared at her. "Who?"

"Katie," Eliot said. "The girl you left behind at Emmerich's house."

"What, the kid?" Jason said. "She needed a place to stay. A lot of people did. Once Emmerich was gone, thought someone might as well get some use out of the house."

"So much for that love story," Parker muttered to Eliot. "He can't even picture her."

"You sure?" Eliot asked. "I thought you were..."

"I am," Parker said. "But I can still tell he's confused. When you're talking about Emmerich, he pictures Emmerich."

"You came up here to find Emmerich," Sterling asked Jason, but he was watching Parker and Eliot. "Did you see him? Or was he already dead?"

"I saw him _once_ ," Jason said. "He was crazier than ever. I shouldn't have even bothered."

"Crazy how?" Sterling asked. "What did he say to you?"

"He said they were on to him. _Don't_ ask me who they were, I don't think Emmerich knew, even. I didn't think they were real. But he said I had to help him. He wanted me to hide him."

"Did you?" Eliot asked.

Jason looked up at them as best he could. "You don't argue with a guy when he's like that. In case you hadn't noticed, I'm cooperating with _you_ guys."

"Smart boy," Sterling said. "And what about Emmerich's 'guy?' Did he come here with Emmerich, or haven't you seen him?"

Jason was talking, answering the question, but Eliot couldn't hear. All his attention was diverted by the way Parker grabbed his arm.

" _Eliot_ ," she hissed. Her fingers were digging in painfully.

"What the hell?" He tried to be quiet, Jason stopped talking and Sterling looked at Eliot in supreme annoyance.

Parker reached out with her other hand, found Eliot's, and mashed their fingers mashed together, painfully.

Least there was no more point in saying anything where Sterling could laugh about it. Parker was standing so close she had to hear him.

_What has gotten into you?_

Parker jerked her head, half a shake, and kept her eyes on Jason's.

"I don't want to know," she said, not even making a sound, just moving her lips to make tiny little letters.

_So leave._

"I want to know."

 _Know_ what.

Slowly, slowly, Parker stood up and walked for Jason, pulling Eliot along behind.

"Jason," she said. "Who was the man who told Emmerich to come here?"

"I don't know his name," Jason protested.

Sterling chuckled to himself. "You don't need to say anything."

Parker let go of Eliot with one hand, keeping the death grip on his fingers, and reached out for Jason's face.

Jason flinched before contact, clearly expecting something painful.

But it was Parker who got hurt.

"That's impossible," she said. "That can't be right."

Sterling's amusement faded at the prospect of failure. "You never told me she could be wrong about something," he asked Eliot.

"Not the time, Sterling," Eliot said. "And get up off there. We got what we need and you're gonna break the man's back."

Sterling pulled himself up off Jason with a sneer.

Parker seemed oblivious to the whole exchange, as did Jason, who was staring up at her trying to figure out what she'd done.

"Why would he do that?" she asked herself.

"Who – " Sterling started, but super strength or no super strength, Eliot shoved him to shut him up.

Parker turned to Eliot and looked him square in the eyes. She didn't have that strained look anymore. She was listening.

After several long moments, Parker's shoulders fell, and she let go of his hand. "You really did it," she said. "You really shut them out."

"Parker," Eliot said, because he thought he knew what she was talking about, but he'd had seven months of not thinking and he couldn't break the habit now.

"I guess now we know why they didn't make it back to Boston," she said. Her voice had gone completely flat, even by Parker standards. Eliot had heard GPS directions with more emotion. "They were busy running some con on Emmerich. I wonder why. It can't have been for money."

"Parker," Eliot said. There was no reaction in her face that indicated she could even hear or see him. He fought down the urge to take her hand again, because that way at least she'd hear him.

Sterling moved to say something, but Eliot gave him the dirtiest glare he could muster, and Sterling held his tongue, though not without a look of his own that promised trouble in the future.

Jason used the distraction to pull himself back up to his feet, though he moved slowly, not immune to the tension in the air.

"Parker," Eliot said again. "Parker, I don't know what you're thinking," though he could guess, "You gotta use your words."

Parker exhaled, still not looking at him. "The guy who told Emmerich to come here was Hardison."


	10. January

"Maggie," Sterling said. "You look lovely as ever."

"James, my time is a little short these days for flattery," Maggie said. "If there's something you want – "

"Actually, Maggie, it's more for us," Eliot said, stepping around Sterling so Maggie could see him through the crack of the door's opening.

Maggie looked surprised. "Eliot?"

"And Parker," he added, because Parker was still lurking out of eyesight.

Maggie looked from him to Sterling a few times, drumming her fingers along the door. "I'm going to regret this," she said warily.

"Probably," Parker said.

Maggie never had known what to make of Parker. Eliot had the feeling that this all would have gone much smoother if he could have left the other two behind – but Sterling had guided them here, and Parker was hard to lose if she'd made up her mind about something, so there was nothing for it but to show up on Maggie's door step with a posse.

-

Eliot had hit the ceiling when Sterling, oh so casually, revealed that he might have a lead on how to find Hardison.

"You don't think you could have told us you knew where Maggie was this whole time?" he fumed. The sight of Parker, staring at a wall and unresponsive even to his yelling, only made him yell louder. "You don't think that's a thing we should have fucking known about?"

"Why?" Sterling demanded. "What possible need to you have of that information? What obligation does she have to you? Do I have to you?"

"We helped you find who _you_ were looking for," Eliot started.

"You said you would _try_ to," Sterling said. "I had no guarantee you'd be useful, or even that you'd stick to your word. And you never once said you were looking for anyone. I had the distinct impression that you weren't."

"Only because we didn't think – "

Sterling steamrolled over him. "And how could your bothering Maggie have changed any of that? How could it have done anything but upset her, and distracted you from our task?"

Eliot had forgotten, if he'd ever really thought about it in the first place, that Sterling had known Maggie and Nate for far longer than Eliot had. That there had been a time when Sterling, at least, considered them all to be friends. That maybe Sterling was capable of having friends that he wouldn't want harassed.

"It doesn't matter," Parker said, standing up fiercely. "We know now. And we aren't distracted. We _have_ to know anything she knows.

So that was that.

-

Maggie let them inside, moving reluctantly. She looked so guarded that she had to know _something._ And whatever it was, she didn't want to share.

There was always the obvious way around that problem, but that didn't make Eliot feel any more at ease.

"Still chasing troublemakers?" Maggie asked Sterling as she poured them all cups of tea from an honest to god teapot. It was a relief to see that the mugs were mismatched and chipped; there was only so much domesticity Eliot could handle at this point. "Or have you decided to face reality with the rest of us?"

"Why do you have to say that like those are two mutually exclusive options?" Sterling asked.

Maggie turned her gaze to Eliot. "I suppose you're on board with his plans for apprehending the person behind April's little surprise."

"Right now our interests are a little closer to home," Eliot said. "We just found out that Hardison is still alive. Or was, as recently as a few months ago. And that Sophie was with him."

"Shouldn't that be good news?" Maggie asked. "You don't look terribly happy about it."

Eliot could think of three things less pleasant than getting into that in front of Sterling and Parker, and two of those things were fatal. "It raises some questions," he said. "Where they are now. Where they've been. And where Nate fits into all of this."

Maggie smiled sardonically. "And you think I might know the answers – at least to that last one."

"They weren't too far from here," Eliot said. "And Nate isn't above coming to you for help."

"Not anymore, no," Maggie said. "Which is thanks in part to you two, and your group. So I suppose you have a right to ask me about him."

It eventually dawned on Eliot that she was not going to continue without prompting. "And?"

"I can't answer," Maggie said. "Not in a way you'll find helpful, at least."

"How is this hard?" Parker burst out. "Have you seen Nate, have you not seen Nate?"

Maggie looked down at her teacup, fighting the weirdest, ugliest smile Eliot had ever seen. "It's harder than you'd think. Nate contacted me, yes."

"When?" Eliot said, trying not to sound too eager – but hell, even Sterling was leaning forward, greedy for knowledge. "What happened? What'd he say?"

"It was a while back, and I haven't seen him since." Maggie stood abruptly. "I'm not sure I'd want to."

She cleared away the mugs in front of them – all of which, aside from hers, had gone completely untouched – and carried them over to a sink for washing.

Parker stood and followed her. Not touching, but fiercely invading her personal space.

Eliot decided to show their cards. "Did he mention a guy named Emmerich?"

"The name came up," Maggie said. "Look, Nate was getting himself involved in something that I didn't like the sound of. I didn't like your plans either, James, when you told me about them. I can't control his business, and I can't control yours, but I think you'd be better off if you stayed out of it."

She returned to the table. Parker took a seat across from Maggie – edging Eliot out of said chair, which ruined the intense watchful thing he was going for – and stared directly into her eyes. And stared. And finally frowned.

"Wait, how are you – you're not letting me read your mind. That's not fair. How are you doing that?" Parker demanded. She sounded like a little kid, someone who didn't have the weight of the world on her shoulders.

Still, it was too bad they couldn't get an answer.

"Have you been holding out on us, Maggie?" Sterling said. "I seem to recall you telling me that you'd been passed over during April's little surprise."

"I was," Maggie said. "I'm just same old Maggie."

Parker placed her hands on the table and leaned forward, eyes wide open, until her face was inches away from the other woman's. "This is _witchcraft_ ," she breathed. "How...?"

Maggie smiled tightly. "I have a very organized mind."

Eliot was torn between thinking this was horseshit, and feeling annoyed that Maggie was apparently better at keeping Parker out than he was. He'd meditated in sub zero weather, with broken bones. He was disciplined, damn it.

Parker sat back, rubbing her eyes in defeat. "Figures," she muttered in disgust. "Maybe I could have got it if Eliot wasn't being all 'grr, I'm tough manly man, hear me roar'."

"I do not sound like that," Eliot started, then cut himself off. There was no point in arguing with her; just because Parker had complete access to anyone's thoughts didn't mean she was any good at interpreting them, and if she couldn't get his thoughts what hope did words have?

Maggie watched. "You could try _asking_ , before you poke around in people's heads."

"They don't ask before they go dragging _me_ into their heads," Parker argued.

Her gaze shifted its accusation from Parker to Sterling, who spread his hands in a gesture of feigned helplessness.

"You were the one telling me to accept reality," he said. "We must use the tools we have been given."

"Am I a tool, James?" she asked.

"No," Eliot said. "You're a friend. Maybe we don't know each other so well, and maybe you don't want any memories of Nate coming around anymore, but it's a lonely time and I for one don't want to be tossing away any friendships I can find." He stood. "Thanks for the tea. It was – unexpected."

Parker and Sterling stood, a few beats behind him, but Maggie wasn't watching them.

"Oh, you're good."

"Me?" Eliot asked.

"You _drip_ sincerity," Maggie told him. "I know those tones. I lived with those tones. I think I helped create those tones."

Eliot didn't deny or feel any shame. "Can't a man be sincere and calculating at the same time?"

"I'm not sure I have ever known any other kind," Maggie said drily. "If I have I've forgotten."

"Well, there's three here who won't be troubling you any more," Eliot said, and moved to put his outer coat back on.

"Wait," Maggie said, sounding resigned, but there was a trace of amusement in her eyes. "Come back here."

Sterling started for the chair across from Maggie, intent on resuming control of the interview, but friendly demeanor or no Eliot wasn't shy or gentle about dissuading him from that course of action.

"Had a thought?" Eliot asked, and looked quickly back at Parker. "One you'd like to share with us?"

Maggie sighed. "There's a place that Nate told me about," she started.

-

They'd been camped the old firehouse that Maggie had pointed them toward for three days, waiting for any sign of people coming or going, before Eliot started wondering if she'd just sent them here to get rid of them.

Probably not. The directions and description of the place had been too exact; she couldn't have pulled it out of nowhere. But even if she'd told the truth, it didn't mean that Nate was still using the building.

It was hard to keep any thoughts but gloomy ones alive, with Sterling sighing dramatically on one side and Parker chattering endlessly on the other.

Eliot chased Sterling away after a day – after it started to look like there'd be a wait – and left him to mingle with the scant population in the neighborhood. It was an older place, run down in a mundane sort of way with weeds and potholes, but largely untouched by large-scale destruction. While there weren't a ton of people, and none of them were too sure about Eliot and his friends, it was something. And anyway, Sterling _was_ occasionally capable of charming people, ones who didn't know him. If Eliot were to mingle with them, in his present state of mind, he'd only help them make up their minds about him, and not for any good.

Parker was harder to shake, and after she shrugged off a few suggestions that some fresh air might be good for her, Eliot dropped it. He'd hardly had a moment without Parker by his side since this whole mess started, and most of those moments had been spent worrying about her. If she'd just sit still and stop talking for three seconds, he'd hardly notice her anymore than he noticed his left foot.

"But the Louvre, that was a joke," Parker snorted. "I mean, they have a pyramid outside. Who can take them seriously after that?"

Eliot didn't answer, anymore than he'd answered the rest of Parker's inane chatter. He had friends who'd gotten into trouble by underestimating French forces.

"...So after a few weeks I just retuned the painting. I mean, no one believed I'd taken it anyway, and it's not like _I_ wanted that creepy woman smiling at me. So I swapped it back..."

It wasn't such a bad story, except that Eliot had heard it at least three times over, and one of them had had Hardison running commentary.

"...And of course I got caught when I was swapping it out the _second_ time. They thought the fake was the original!" Parker snorted and shook her head. "You'd think could at least find _someone_ who could tell the difference between an authentic and a fake. Even if it is a Caffrey fake."

"Parker," Eliot said. "Does this story have a _point_?"

"Nope," Parker admitted.

"Isn't your voice getting tired?" he demanded.

Parker shrugged.

"Fine," Eliot said. "But I'm focusing here, so don't be offended if I don't answer back to any of your talking."

"Offended?" Parker snorted. "I'm counting on it."

Eliot proceeded to not say anything.

"Look at me, I'm grumpy Eliot, talking is not manly enough for me."

Eliot settled himself back into his seat, not sure if he was amused or disturbed by Parker's impression of him. "I told you I don't sound like that."

"I am a master warrior and not a buffoon," Parker continued gruffly.

"If I'm such a drag, why're you always hanging around?" Because there was so much else for her to do, obviously.

Parker didn't drop the Eliot-impression. "I need no one, I am a lone wolf."

"Yeah, lot of lone wolves go hunting around the entire fucking continent looking for the rest of the pack," Eliot muttered.

For a split second, he thought he saw her façade crack. But he wasn't looking closely. It might have just been a trick of the fading winter light.

"I have to say the opposite of whatever Parker says." She was starting to get hoarse from mimicking his voice.

"I do not," he said, and winced, because that was exactly what he was supposed to say. Now he was starting to get angry. He didn't think like that, at all –

Obviously. She knew that.

Eliot relaxed a little, before tensing back up; this wasn't the kind of game he excelled at. "Oh, look at me, I'm Parker," he said, raising his voice just a note or two, because damn if he was putting on a falsetto, even with an audience of one, and anyway it wasn't like Parker sounded that girly anyway. Even that was too much, and he had to clear his throat before he could continue. "I want to build a skyscraper of money so I can jump off it."

Parker stared at him, the strangest look on her face.

Eliot just tried to enjoy the first minute of silence he'd had all day.

"I don't sound like that at all," she said finally.

"Yeah, yeah," Eliot said. "Guess we're not so good at getting in each other's heads after all."

Parker took a seat beside him and wrapped her arms around herself. "Guess not."

Eliot kept his eyes ahead of him. They were on a stakeout, even if he was the only one acting like it.

"Did I ever tell you about the time I was in Austria?" he asked.

Parker shook her head.

"All right then," he said, and told her.

-

Eliot was starting to make peace with the idea of failure. So he was just getting on to relaxing when he saw someone heading toward the building, skipping along from shadow to shadow.

Between the distance and the darkness, he couldn't get a good look at the person's face. He didn't need to. He knew that gait, even after ten months. He'd have known it after ten years.

At least Parker had ducked out to go nag Sterling, an activity that never quite got old for Eliot, no matter how many times he witnessed it.

Just now, he was glad to have the moment to himself.

He waited until the figure entered the firehouse, then followed, quietly as he knew how.

He'd scoped out the layout of the building early on, once he was sure that no one was inside. He was able to move about just fine despite the dark.

Ahead of him, he heard a muffled thump – a toe hitting a raised threshold, maybe – and a few mild curse words. Typical.

He hung back until he saw a light go on in a room up ahead. He waited a few more seconds for his eyes to adjust to the light, then crossed the hallway and stepped into the room.

He wasn't big on words, so he just let the door swing shut behind him to announce his presence.

Turning around slowly – so he was expecting _someone_ – it took a few seconds for their eyes to meet, and a few seconds more before an exaggerated look of shock told Eliot that he'd actually been seen.

"Eliot," Hardison breathed, like he really didn't believe it. "Eliot, Eliot, man, is that really you?" he said, getting louder and louder as he talked. He stepped quickly toward Eliot, spreading his arms out wide for a hug.

The second he was close enough, Eliot punched him in the jaw.

Hardison rocked back, hands flying to his face, looking betrayed. Hardison never could keep his goddamn heart off his sleeve.

"What the hell," is what Eliot assumed Hardison said. It was garbled, but then, Hardison wasn't usually the one going out and getting hit in the face. And Eliot had never hit him before, not like he meant it.

"You don't get to what the hell me," Eliot said. "Me punching you is not 'what the hell,' that's what you deserve. Parker and I waited for you for three fucking months with a bunch of psychopaths breathing down out necks and you never showed because you're out here playing scientist with Doctor Doom. That's 'what the hell'."

Hardison'd been making a big deal of massaging and stretching his jaw, but he stopped when Eliot said Parker's name. His eye lit up. It didn't do wonders for Eliot's mood, since there was every chance in the world he hadn't heard a damn word Eliot's said after "Parker."

"Parker's okay? Is she here? Where – "

"Nope," Eliot said. "I get answers first."

Hardison sighed, but not even he could deny that this was way past the time for theatrics and sulking. "Look, man, we tried," he started. "After – it took us a while to get back together. I had to find Sophie, which wasn't too easy, and then we both had to find Nate and that was a job and a half, you would not _believe_ how that man went to ground when the shit hit the fan, we'd probably still be looking for him if he hadn't stumbled over us one day – and then we were looking for _you_ when we got wind of the magic man who'd handed out all these party favors. Plus some less than happy recipients who were planning on having some words with him about his taste in gifts."

Eliot's anger, briefly sated after he'd punched Hardison, flared back up. "So you decided to look for Emmerich before you looked for us?"

"We _looked_ for you, man," Hardison said. Eliot didn't need Parker's gift to know that he was telling the truth. It didn't calm him down any. "We looked _everywhere_ for you, where the hell were you?"

Eliot hadn't thought about those first few days – weeks – not since they'd happened. It came trickling back up now, the whole world blowing up in his face, Parker catatonic, and somewhere inside it all a little voice telling him to just cut his losses and run.

"Boston," he said finally.

"Well I'm sorry if we didn't have time to follow you across state lines when any reasonable person would have stayed put – " Hardison stopped himself, holding out his hands to stop Eliot from saying anything, either. "By the time we heard about Emmerich, there were already people looking for him, and not to tell him thank you," Hardison said, voice low. "You two – we hadn't seen you, we'd looked everywhere, and we knew you could take care of yourselves. Emmerich couldn't, and we couldn't risk that something would happen to him. He was the only one who knew anything about all this."

"So you pulled a _con_ on him?"

"Why do you say that like it's something dirty? We weren't going after him for money or anything stupid like that. We were trying to protect the future of humanity."

Eliot laughed abruptly. "Really funny. What future? You even been out there, man? People with powers are killing people without 'em, people without powers are killing each other out of panic, little children are turning into ice – what was Emmerich possibly going to do about that?"

"Obviously, the man's plan didn't turn out perfectly."

"Obv-"

"But now Nate is the one doing the planning. And you know how the man can plan."

Eliot eyed Hardison carefully. "Maggie told me this plan was no good."

"There's still a lot of work to do, we have most of the science down. We can turn it around."

Maggie's reservations had not been about whether or not Nate would succeed.

Eliot leaned against a wall. His angry energy was ebbing away, leaving him tired and dissatisfied. After so long, there surely had to be more he'd meant to say to Hardison, but he couldn't think of a damn thing.

"So where are they?" he asked finally.

Hardison hesitated for a split second.

"I'm not going to punch anyone else, okay?" Eliot said. "I've got it out of my system."

"Nice to know I'm special, then," Hardison sniffed. "Come on, Sophie should be back soon."

Eliot made himself push off the wall and follow Hardison deeper into the firehouse, arriving at an empty, cavernous garage. Hardison turned on a light, illuminating a small patch of room around them and turn the rest to shadows. Well, just because they had electricity still didn't mean they could waste any. The light was enough for Eliot to see that the table it sat on was covered with papers: notebooks, charts, equations, most of them illegible scribbles. He didn't strain his eyes trying to read them. He had a pretty good idea of what they were.

Hardison sat, but fidgeted, while Eliot propped himself up again, still standing. The way he felt, if he sat down he's squirm worse than Hardison, and the thought was inexcusable.

It was an awkward wait until Hardison could get his words out. "But Parker's _here_ , right?"

"She's around."

"Around – just around, you know, really soaking in the apocalypse, seeing the sights, getting into who knows what trouble alone with the Brotherhood of Mutants out there – "

"You got a lot of trouble around here?" Eliot asked.

"Not really," Hardison admitted. "But you never know."

"She can take care of herself," Eliot said. "And Sterling's with her."

For a split second, the look on Hardison's face made everything absolutely worthwhile. "What are you doing with _Sterling_?"

"Trying not to kill each other, mostly," Eliot said.

"That's mostly what you're doing, or your trying not to mostly kill him?"

Eliot was about to remind Hardison that he didn't care for semantic games, but he didn't get a chance, because just then a woman entered the garage, through the back door.

She looked about sixty, white hair and wrinkles all over, and wearing an unflattering paisley pant suit.

She didn't look at all familiar to him, but the look of surprise on her face, the way her hand moved up toward her face before she caught herself, the flick of her eyes to Hardison, looking for reassurance, those were all terribly familiar.

"Sophie," he said. "You look like hell."

"You always knew how to make a woman feel special," she said, in a crackled voice that sounded like Eliot's third grade teacher. "Do excuse me for a moment while I change. I didn't realize we'd have company."

She stepped back outside briefly.

Eliot looked over at Hardison. "What are you guys up to that she needs to be sneaking around in disguise?"

Hardison grinned. "The locals feel a lot better about us when we've got an old lady staying with us. Figure she can't be much trouble."

Eliot shook his head. He never was the best at dealing with Sophie; her switching faces didn't help, even if she stepped outside to do so discretely. Parker had told them, through Jason's memories, that one of Emmerich's old friends had vouched for Hardison. At least now Eliot knew how that had happened.

"See you learned a new trick," Eliot said as Sophie returned.

"This?" Sophie laughed dismissively. "Honestly, it's such a joke. Turn myself into anyone I want? I could do that already, thanks."

"See? See that right there?" Hardison said. "You don't even appreciate what you have. You have a gift, woman, and you're just complaining. Why couldn't I get a superpower? I've been waiting all my life for one. Even when they laughed at me, 'cause there were no radioactive spiders, only now superpowers are real and I still don't get one. Do you believe this?"

Eliot growled. "It's not all fun and games."

"I'm sorry, did you want to complain about how lucky you are, too?"

"No, I'm saying you should save your little speech about the awesomeness of superpowers until you've met Parker."

That brought Hardison immediately back down again. "You said she was okay. I thought you said – "

"She's walking and breathing just fine," Eliot said. "But she's not having a party."

"What – "

"You talk to her," Eliot said. "That's her business."

Sophie watched him cooling. Sizing him up. "Then what are you here to talk about, Eliot?"

"Can't just be here because I missed you?"

"I would love if that were the case," Sophie said. "But it isn't, is it."

"No," Eliot said. "I want to talk about Emmerich."

She took a seat next to Hardison and gestured grandly for Eliot to sit across from her. "We must have first made contact with him – what, in June?"

Eliot cut her off. "I don't care about that part. I was thinking more about how he got his head bashed in."

"The man had a lot of enemies," Sophie said. "It sounds like you might be one of them."

"Most people didn't know who was responsible," Eliot said. "And most people couldn't get past the three of you when you've got a plan. Or didn't you bring him up north to keep him safe?"

"I don't know if you've been paying attention, but 'safe' is a whole new ballgame now, one for which I do not have the rulebook," Hardison said.

"How about justice?"

"What does this look like to you, CSI?"

Eliot looked around the lab, where Hardison had spread out the scraps of Emmerich's research. "Kind of, yeah."

"Look, what Hardison is loathe to say – and myself as well, but let's be perfectly honest – is that Emmerich wasn't the priority anymore. He quite plainly didn't want to work with us, or anyone for that matter, so we got what pieces of his research we could from him and left him to his solitude."

"You left him to get killed."

Sophie spread her hands open, helplessly. "What more could we have done?"

"Anything at all?"

Hardison rubbed his eyes. "Look, nobody's happy about the guy dying," he started. "But we haven't seen him since Nate disappeared, and even if we could somehow figure out what stranger, probably with unknown superpowers, killed him, there are other things that are more critical."

Eliot frowned. "Nate's gone? I thought you said this was his plan."

"I said he disappeared, not that he was gone," Hardison answered. "He's still running the show."

"What does that – "

"Hello, Eliot," a familiar voice said from behind him.

Eliot spun around. There was no one there.

No, that wasn't quite right. He couldn't see anyone. But the door was open wider than he and Hardison had left it, and the draft that had been blowing through was diminished. Like something was blocking it.

Eliot looked down at the ground and saw faint smudges of new footprints on the floor. They stopped about ten feet in front of him.

He looked up from that spot, to where his eyes must have been. His face was blank, but inside he was thinking about Maggie almost laughing when they'd asked if she'd seen him. She could have given them a fucking heads up.

"Nate," Eliot said. "What've you done to yourself?"


	11. February

Eliot hadn't predicted Hardison new set up.

He should have; Hardison had never let storms or power outages or the authorities separate him from his pretty screens for long, so what was a little thing like the apocalypse? Even if it meant building a system from scraps, and jury-rigging it to a wobbly generator, and doing so without the mixture of orange soda and online gaming trash talk that usually fueled his work.

Eliot would've been more impressed if he could see what any of that was supposed to accomplish.

"My baby can accomplish _anything_ ," Hardison said, running a hand over the screen, because the geek's creepy over-attachment to machines hadn't dampened in the least.

"I'd have thought what with the Internet and most of the power grids going down, you'd finally have gotten some sunlight and fresh air," Eliot said. "Somehow you're even worse than before."

"I'm sorry, could you recreate the last few decades of computer science using stone knives and bear skins?" Hardison demanded. "Even my great, Spock-like genius does not throw together this lovely contraption in a day."

Eliot snorted. Hardison's 'lovely contraption' took up most of the room, smelled like diesel fuel, and looked like the afternoon leftovers of a yard sale.

Hardison ignored Eliot. "And then there was all that time trying to wrangle a paranoid scientist, who also had systems in need of rebuilding, not to mention trying to make sense of the chicken-scratch he called handwriting – "

"You're one to talk," Eliot muttered.

" – So sorry if I haven't been stopping to smell the roses."

Eliot had mostly been frustrated and bored, up to this point, but now he was starting to get a real feeling of uneasiness. "You've really spent all your time working on this thing?" he asked.

Hardison patted his machines again. "Don't let the mean, uncivilized man call you a thing. You are beautiful." To Eliot, he answered, "After everything shook out the way it did?" Apparently even Hardison's glibness couldn't talk about the previous April too directly. "Yeah, it seemed like a good idea."

"So you haven't been out there?" he asked. "You haven't seen Boston, or any of the cities, or the towns? Anything?"

Hardison looked defensive. He thought he was in for another lecture, never mind that Eliot hadn't bothered since the first day. "You know I haven't seen Boston."

Eliot let it drop. If Hardison couldn't see what was wrong with that, Eliot wasn't going to beat his head on a brick wall trying to explain it. "What good is a computer supposed to do if you don't have anything else to hook it up with?" he asked. "There aren't any other computers for it to talk to."

Hardison's smile returned, the same condescension it always had when he talked to Eliot about tech things. "What is a computer good for, it's good for _computing_ ," he said, then looked down at the cryptic scrawls that passed for Emmerich's research notes. "And we can use all the help we can get."

"It can't hurt, right?" Parker said, thumping down in the seat next to Eliot and nudging Hardison with her elbow - or she would have, if Hardison hadn't jumped at her sudden unannounced arrival.

Eliot managed to stifle his own surprise, but just barely. The effort didn't leave him in a good mood. "What're you doing sneaking up on people like - "

Parker snorted. "Like what, a thief?"

Eliot scowled. That wasn't what he'd been about to say.

"I gotta practice," Parker said. If she'd heard what he'd thought, she ignored it. "Once we get things back to normal, it's breaking and entering, pick pocketing, and grand larceny for me." She sighed, dreamily. "My skills are getting rusty. I can't remember the last time I scaled a wall."

"You dropped down on those thugs just fine, in Boston."

"But that was ages ago," Parker said.

Hardison nodded.

Eliot felt a weird possessiveness at the gesture. Hardison didn't ask 'what thugs' - he just agreed. Parker must have told him about the things he'd missed.

The idea left a bad taste in Eliot's mouth, which made him more uncomfortable than ever.

"You don't need any practice being creepy," Eliot muttered, to have something to say. "You've always been just fine at that."

Parker pouted, so her feelings couldn't have been too hurt. "Being a thief isn't about being creepy."

"So what's your excuse?"

"What's yours, man?" Hardison asked. "You've been all 'stoic super soldier' worse than ever lately."

Parker clapped. "That's what I said!"

"Maybe I just think with all you optimists around daydreaming all the time, it couldn't hurt to have someone actually working," Eliot said.

"Oh, work," Hardison waved a hand. "I work, I work hard. Nothing's getting done until I figure out how Emmerich made all this happen. Now if by work, you meant 'sulking around being gloomy,' you'll want to go find Sterling or Nate for that."

"Yeah, if I could find him."

Hardison shrugged. "You get used to it, man."

Eliot had had a week now to get used to Nate, and he couldn't see how another week, or two, or a year would make any difference. "I don't like that he's hiding himself."

"You know what that is, that is prejudice against the super powered right there," Hardison said.

"I don't like Parker sneaking up on me either," Eliot argued. "I don't like people sneaking up on their friends."

"Don't blame Bruce Banner cause the Hulk kicked you around."

He scowled. "What does that even mean?"

Hardison threw his hands up in the air and turned to Parker, theatrical in his dismay. "Do you see what I have to work with? That's - I'm not even talking an obscure reference, I didn't just throw down Psychlocke, okay. Hulk is mainstream, even if the Ang Lee movie – "

"I think he just wanted to know why you were talking about the Hulk," Parker explained. "Not who the Hulk is."

"Oh." The wind fell out of Hardison's sails. "I'm just saying, it's not like everyone who's been affected by this thing has an exact idea of what they're doing, all the time." He couldn't quite stop his eyes from darting over to Parker's still face. "Which just makes it all the more important that I get my work done. You don't like not being able to see Nate, then stop bothering me and go find some cement blocks to chop in half."

Eliot grinned, in the way that he knew Hardison found spooky. "Anyone can chop a cement block in half. I've got my own ways to keep busy."

Hardison shuddered. "All right, Scary Stories with Eliot Spencer is wrapping up for this week, tune in next week when Eliot kills five men with a spatula, probably. You want to help me with this?" he asked Parker.

Parker shook her head. "In a minute. I'm going with Eliot. In case he can't find a spatula."

Hardison shuddered again. Eliot watched until he'd got back to pouring over lines of data on the screen, then followed Parker out of the room and down the hallway.

"Here I thought you'd had enough of me to last a lifetime," he said.

She stopped in the middle of the hallway, far enough away from Hardison's open door that they couldn't hear him muttering to himself.

"He's not here," Parker said.

Eliot raised an eyebrow.

"Nate. He's not here. So you can say whatever you want."

"Fine," Eliot said. "I don't like it. Him creeping around. I don't think Sophie or Hardison like it, either, but you wouldn't catch them admitting it."

"Because he might be listening," Parker added.

Eliot shrugged. "Yeah, that too. What is he thinking, walking around like that?"

Parker started to say something, but stopped herself.

"Do you _know_?"

She shook her head. "I'd have to see him to read his mind," she said quietly. "He's like Maggie – too good at keeping his thoughts inside."

"He always was a poker-faced bastard," Eliot muttered.

Parker quirked her mouth into a small, bitter small. "But I can tell if he's around. And I get a feeling..."

She didn't finish. "A feeling?" Eliot prompted.

"I think Hardison was wrong about him," she admitted finally. "I think Nate likes it. Being," she made some vague hand gesture.

"Invisible?"

Parker shrugged. "Yeah, that too."

"So you don't think he's stuck that way."

Parker very slowly shook her head.

"Great." Eliot looked back over his shoulder, not knowing what he expected to achieve with that. "Here I'd been thinking we'd find him and he'd be dead drunk."

"No, you'd been thinking he was dead," Parker said flatly. "But he's not, and neither's Hardison or Sophie, and that's supposed to be a good thing. So stop being all snide and mean to Hardison, or just go stomping off with Sterling. At least he expects you to not like him."

Eliot gaped at her, but Parker didn't stick around to watch. She walked back to Hardison's lair, for all the good it would do her.

-

"Why the hell are we playing like this is a job we're setting up," Eliot muttered as he got into his seat.

"I don't know, I rather like the ritual of it," Sophie said, sitting across from him.

"Pretending like Hardison can just set up some screens – "

"Hey, I worked hard for these screens, there isn't anything 'just' about it – "

" – and do the run through and we'll go con some people." Eliot shook his head.

"What's wrong with that?" Parker asked.

"There's nothing to _con_ ," he answered. "It's not like anyone has any money anymore."

"No," a voice from the head of the table said. Eliot and Hardison jumped; Sophie played it cool, but her mouth tightened and her hands shook, a tiny bit. Only Parker was truly unsurprised. Would have been nice of her to warn them. "People don't have money any more. But they have something that matters."

Parker's head whipped around. "Are you saying _money_ doesn't _matter_?"

Glad as Eliot was to hear Parker sounding like herself, it wasn't enough for Eliot to be happy with the situation. He took it out on Sterling. "Nice of you to show up," he said, as Sterling strolled in.

"I beg your pardon," Sterling said, meaning anything but that. " _Do_ continue, I'd hate to inconvenience you at all, Mr. Spencer."

There was a sigh from the empty chair at the head of the table. Apparently invisibility didn't stop Nate from getting annoyed. "Hardison, get us up to speed."

Hardison fell into the same patter he'd always used in these things, showing off what he'd learned. The graphics weren't as good as they'd have been a year ago, but it wasn't necessary. Everyone had a clear picture of what'd happened.

"Alfred Emmerich, deceased, scientist, near as we can tell went looking for ways to pimp the human genome. Bit of a recluse and a terrible conversationalist, by the way, man could make a brick wall feel chatty. And it beats me how he ever got anything done, since he left big gaps in all of his records – "

"Perhaps he was only writing down what he couldn't count on himself to remember," Nate observed drily. "And we know all this. We also know that he accomplished something, even if it wasn't what he intended."

"Ah," Hardison said, pointing at Nate's chair. "But do you know how he accomplished it? That, my friends, is my big coup de grace. My fait accompli. My Arc de Triomphe."

Sophie opened her mouth, then snapped it shut, shaking her head in resignation.

"The suspense is killing me," Sterling uttered.

Parker beat Hardison to the punch. "Nanobots!"

"Nanobots?" Eliot said. Things had been ridiculous, sure, but, "What've you been drinking in that lab of yours?"

"Nothing," Hardison said. "And it makes perfect sense – "

" – Do you even know what those words mean, 'perfect sense' – "

"There had to be an agent to work these changes," he said. "You can't just magic this into people. This took time. They were in the water, the air – they got into us one by one, biding their time, then bam – the switch got flipped to activate them. Which was not quite as simple or painless a process as Emmerich had hoped."

"But then, he hadn't foreseen a lot of things happening," Nate said. "His own murder included. But why only half the population?"

Hardison shrugged. "Search me. But I can tell you, he missed an opportunity there. There's nanobots in everybody. The half that changed was just the half who'd hit critical mass."

"Jason said it happened too soon," Parker chimed in. She turned to Sterling and Eliot. "You remember? He said it made Emmerich even more paranoid, because it wasn't supposed to have gone off yet." 

"It was supposed to be worse," Sterling said. "Wonderful."

Eliot was suddenly, in a way he would never admit to, uncomfortable with the idea of tiny robots floating around in his body. He coughed. "So turn the bots off."

"Wow. Turn them off. That was – thank you, that was really insightful. Look now, do I tell you how to beat people up?"

"Yeah, all the damn time."

"So let me just do the technical stuff, all right?" Hardison continued as though Eliot hadn't answered. "The nanobots aren't the ones using the powers. They just made the change possible. Their job is done. Everything that happens after? That's all human, baby."

"Could we reprogram the nanobots," at least Nate didn't seem too happy about that word either, "to change people back?"

Invisible Nate was even worse than nanobots.

Hardison turned serious. "I don't know how," he admitted. "I've been beating my head on that and all it's giving me is a headache. We don't have the hardware, or the software, or the data. Emmerich might've been working on that, but the man did not like taking notes, and somebody killed him before he could say."

More than one head turned.

Sterling smiled. "I do believe I'm insulted. I would never have wasted a resource like Emmerich."

Hardison still looked suspicious, but he kept going. "Look, all I'm saying is, don't expect a rabbit out of my hat right now. It's going to take me some time to fix it."

"This is the end of the world," Eliot said. "You don't fix this, you survive it."

"This is a _tech problem_ , sometimes it feels like that is all I do, is fix tech problems. What you did, just there? That's negative thinking, and it's small picture."

"How about you go out there and see what's actually going on in the world before you decide you know what the big picture is."

Parker groaned and thumped her head on the table. Sophie and Sterling limited themselves to a restrained eye roll. This was becoming an old argument. Hardison hadn't given up hope that something could be done, with what they had of Emmerich's research and equipment, to undo the changes. Eliot thought it was impossible, and that they'd all be better off if they could accept that and move on. Parker claimed to agree with him, but spent so much time helping Hardison tinker that Eliot didn't believe her. Sterling felt that a cure was a secondary goal to re-establishing order on a large scale, which sounded good in theory, but no one could agree on what exactly that order would look like, if it could even done at all. Sterling spent a lot of time pestering the people who'd remained in this relatively quiet corner of the world, when he wasn't talking with Eliot or Sophie about the places they'd been since April. Eliot was sparing with the details, and never stuck around to hear what Sophie had to say. He didn't care where she'd been; it hadn't been Boston.

Whatever opinions Nate had about any of it, he kept to himself.

That didn't stop Hardison, or any of them, from thinking of him as being in charge. It just meant they didn't know where they were charging to, and Eliot hated feeling blind.

"Hardison." Nate didn't let them get into it all over again. "See what you _can_ do. There's no sense in making a decision without having all of the information. Eliot. You wanted to talk about Emmerich?"

Eliot sighed. "All we know is he was hit over the head. His assistant claims he didn't see anything useful."

"And he didn't," Parker said.

Eliot looked at her.

"What? You made it sound like you didn't believe him."

"Someone had to know something," Eliot argued.

"Plenty of crimes go unsolved even in the best of times," Sterling pointed out.

Sophie batted her eyelashes at him. "Stop it, you'll make me blush."

"And I don't like the thought that someone was interfering with his work," Eliot said. "Might have been none of this would have happened at all but someone screwed it up. Or sabotaged it."

"Unfortunately, Emmerich's office is hundreds of miles away, and he can't tell us anything about that," Nate said. "What precisely were you hoping to learn from any of it?"

Parker gave Eliot a weird look, which didn't go unnoticed by the rest of the table. So now he had to share what he'd been thinking or they'd know he was holding back.

"I want to know why the hell someone would do something like this," Eliot said. "This isn't science, it's playing God. Even if he didn't mean for it to happen like this. Aren't scientists supposed to start playing with rats or something, not unleashing their experiments on the whole damn world?"

"He has a point." The chair Nate was sitting in swung around from Eliot back to Hardison. "This is too widespread, even for an accidental exposure; we've covered half of the United States between us all, and the rest of the world must be in the same shape or we'd have seen signs of them by now. Rescue workers or invaders, either way."

"Or perhaps they prefer to leave the damned alone," Sterling said drily.

"Oh, you are in a mood today," Sophie chided him. "Who's the damned, then, the ones who changed or the ones who didn't?"

"Looks to me like we're all in the same mess," Eliot said.

"But not everyone is equipped to handle it." It was Nate's putting-an-end-to-this voice. "And I for one would like to know what can be done – anything – to change that."


	12. March

Things didn't change much after their strategy meeting, except that as spring started to think about making an appearance, everyone became more and more restless.

Hardison hardly ever budged from his cave-like laboratory, and he and Parker would talk about nanobots and their programming and how they could have spread until their eyes were glassy and their voices worn hoarse. Eliot didn't spend much time with them; they either enthused to him about some new theory, wanting his input, or else snapped at him if he distracted them in any way. Since he didn't have any input, they spent most of the time snapping at them. Once or twice he found himself deliberately heading to the lab to disturb them, and shook himself off. He didn't think they had any chance of succeeding, anyway, so why was he trying to find ways to slow them down?

Sophie was almost worse for having no real focus for her direction. She found projects – the small community surrounding the firehouse had things they needed rebuilt, torn down, or fixed – but Eliot could tell they didn't keep her happy. He didn't like the thought of Sophie Devereaux trying to find ways to amuse herself.

He spent more time with her, shooting the breeze and playing card games, when she wasn't busy in town. This place was smaller than Cooperstown, but Eliot had a long memory.

Sterling disappeared late in February, claiming he'd be back if he found anything. Eliot doubted he'd find anything, but figured he'd be back at some point. There were too few familiar faces to go throwing some away.

That left Eliot at Nate's disposal for long stretches of time, and he found that Hardison was half-right. It didn't stop being weird that he couldn't see Nate. But he stopped focusing on it so completely. 

"Parker says you met some interesting characters in Boston," Nate prompted him one day.

"Don't know about interesting," Eliot said. "One power-hungry man fast talking people into doing whatever he wants. You see that everywhere."

"Tell me about him anyway," Nate said. "I always like to know what my fellow con men are up to."

Eliot told him the story. In a way, it was easier than if he'd been able to see Nate's face, and his individual reactions to each detail. It was easier than telling Sophie or Hardison, too, because Eliot knew Nate wouldn't think the telling absolved him for his absence. Nate never absolved himself from anything.

After asking several questions about Lindsey's ability to find people like Parker, Nate sighed. From the sound of it, he was leaning back and resting his feet on the table in front of him. "I don't suppose the bar is still in good shape," he said thoughtfully.

"Could be worse," Eliot said. "Your place was trashed, though."

Nate laughed.

Sometimes Eliot could almost forget that anything had changed. Sometimes he could almost think they really were just out of town on a job, and there'd be a radio in his ear so he could hear Hardison complaining, and a harness for Parker, and some outlandish new accent for Sophie.

And then Nate would say something like:

"We could use a skill like that."

And Eliot would wake up again.

"I'm happy leaving people to their own business," Eliot said. "They've got enough to deal with, especially the ones that've changed."

He couldn't say how, but he knew that Nate was looking right at him. "Do you pity us that much?"

"All I know is, a lot of people I've seen haven't turned out so well in the head."

"Parker's changed."

"Parker is her own case," he said, which seemed both more and less cruel than saying she'd always had a screw loose.

"And Sophie?" Nate prodded. "And me?"

"It hasn't helped your social skills much," Eliot said. "But you only use those when you need something, anyway, so who cares?"

Nate hmmmed. "I'm almost positive you used to respect me."

Eliot stood up. "Then maybe you're not so well in the head after all."

Nate laughed again, and Eliot smiled a bit, and then he went off to find Sophie, because if anyone could ever tell what was going on with Nate, it was her.

She was alone in her bedroom, changing back from the old woman whose name, apparently, was Denise. Which just made Eliot wonder if there was a real Denise, which made him shudder. Still, he stepped inside the room and shut the door behind him too quickly for someone else to follow, just in case.

Sophie turned to him, eyebrows raised. "Can I help you?"

"Maybe," he said. "What's Nate really playing at here?"

"My, my, you don't beat around the bush," Sophie said.

"I never did," Eliot reminded her, "and you asked."

"No, you have always been _painfully_ direct. And I suppose our long separation hasn't helped either my memory or your mood." She sat on her bed and motioned for him to join her. "Although I do wish you would stop blaming us all for that. There were some rather difficult circumstances."

Eliot scowled. "I'm not here to talk about that."

"No, but I am," Sophie said. "You have got to stop holding a grudge. I _am_ sorry we weren't there, mostly for Parker's sake, though who knows if having more people around would actually have done her any good. And I wish we could have made it to Boston. Though you could have stayed and looked for us. I do wonder why that didn't occur to you first. Why you thought running away to a different city and leaving no trace was the simplest solution."

Eliot looked away. "Return to base. It's standard protocol."

"Or is it just that you were already out of town before the adrenaline died down and you even thought of us?" Sophie asked. "Maybe the only surprising thing is that you took Parker with you at all."

"I wouldn't leave her behind," Eliot snapped.

"You didn't seem to have any trouble leaving us behind," Sophie said.

He turned back to argue with her, but the look on her face stopped him. "That's no fair you turning my words against me," he said.

"Someone had to let you know how tiresome you've become." There was no shame or apology in her voice. She sounded rather pleased with herself. Not that there was any other way for her to be and still be Sophie Devereaux. Maybe it was a good thing. She, at least, had shown no sign of losing herself. "And maybe now you'll stop growling at Hardison and worrying about Nate. I don't want you to turn out a paranoid old man like Emmerich."

"Emmerich was right. He thought someone was after him, and someone bashed in his skull," Eliot said. It still irritated him that they couldn't find out who – with Lindsey fresh on his mind, it occurred to him that many people might have had new tricks for finding someone who'd wronged them, but he turned down that line of thought. "And Nate hasn't exactly been himself."

"Perhaps not," Sophie said slowly. "But who has?"

"You just told me that I'm the same as always," Eliot said. "Sterling's still an annoying bastard. Hardison's going to rebuild the Internet if it kills him. Not to mention the way you just played me like a mark."

She had a thoughtful expression on her face.

"So what is Nate up to, really?"

"What do you want me to say, Eliot?" she asked. "I don't know what he's planning. I'm not sure he has a definite plan yet or just an idea. If he doesn't even know his long game, how am I supposed to?"

"You know him better than anyone," Eliot said. "Guess."

She laughed, a little sadly. "I guess that he's going to do what he always does. Manipulate everyone, annoy you, infuriate me, lord about like he's the savior of the world, and somehow fix whatever it is he set out to fix against all odds. Call it business as usual."

"Man's been invisible for a year, how is that business as usual?"

"Oh, Eliot," she sighed. "Nate's always been able to turn himself invisible. Didn't you ever pay attention on any of those cons we pulled?"

"Don't give me metaphors," he warned her.

She patted him on the shoulder. "I promise to keep an eye on him for you – _metaphorically_ ," she teased. "If you shall promise to lighten up."

"I'm not sure that's something I can promise."

"I'll promise it for you, then," Sophie said. "And I always collect on debts."

-

Eliot went to poke his head in on Hardison and Parker. In the spirit of the promise he hadn't made to Sophie, he was planning on being polite, even if it meant listening to useless babble about nanobots.

It didn't go according to plan. Parker took one look at him and said, "Oh, that again."

"What again?" Hardison asked, because he was incapable of ignoring something that wasn't his business.

"Yes, that, again," Eliot said. "Which isn't why I came to talk to you."

"Yes, because you wanted to hear all about Hardison's progress with re-starting the bots," Parker rolled her eyes. "He's brooding about Nate again."

"Why are you brooding about Nate?" Hardison asked. "He's here, he's fine, we're all together. What is there to brood about?"

Parker rested her chin on her hands. "Eliot always finds something to brood about. He thinks Nate's up to something."

"Of course Nate's up to something," Hardison told Eliot. "Something called saving the world, and if you haven't noticed, some of us are trying to help."

"I didn't come here to save the world," Eliot said. "Or to talk to people who act like they're in the interview segment of a beauty pageant."

"What'd Nate do to spook you this time?" Parker asked.

"Nothing," Eliot said. "I don't like the way he talks about powers, that's all."

"How so?" Hardison asked, sounding interested. He actually looked away from the computer screen, for one thing.

"He doesn't sound like a man who's trying to figure out how to turn them off."

"Then why else would he be having me bust my ass getting these nanobots running again?" Hardison asked.

"Guess we'll find out soon," Parker said.

Eliot turned to her. "What do you mean?"

"Hello? I told you when you came in, Hardison's almost got the re-start problem figured out," Parker said. It was the same tone of voice she used when Sophie talked about going to museums to _look_ at the artwork.

Eliot had lived through enough of Nate's crazy plans to know that they generally worked. Knowing that this plan was that much closer to being done should have made him feel better.

It didn't.

"So what now?" Parker asked.

"Nothing," he said. "Tell me more about nanobots."

Parker didn't buy it for a second. But it distracted Hardison and gave Eliot a chance to play nice for as long as he could manage. Then he escaped back up to his room to think.

Before he left, Hardison stepped out from behind his control center and gripped his shoulder. "Hey, man, it's okay," he said. "Nate's a bit freaky right about now, but it's going to be better once give those 'bots some termination-with-extreme-prejudice."

Eliot stared at Hardison. "You do terrible impressions. Have you ever even seen Apocalypse Now?"

"Hey you know what? End of the world, no Netflix, no Red Box, nobody to prove that that isn't what Apocalypse Now sounds like."

-

As Hardison took no end of delight in reminding him, Eliot wasn't a tech expert. He couldn't write new code or hack the Pentagon or untag those photos of him that Hardison had put on Facebook. But he wasn't completely clueless. It's just that his line of work didn't often call for creating things with technology.

He knew all about how to wipe things out.

Probably destroying Hardison's work once the geek had fallen asleep at his keyboard was a violation of Sophie's command to play nice, but he could make it up to them later.

-

He was sitting down to breakfast with Sophie and Nate, carefully not looking at the piece of toast that vanished bite by bite in mid-air, when they heard Hardison yelling from upstairs.

Eliot sprang up, running to the rescue, with Sophie close behind. A look behind showed him that she'd turned herself into a tall, muscled linebacker of a man, however much good that might do in case of trouble. As far as he could tell, Nate wasn't following, or at least not very closely.

Closer to the scene, there wasn't any sign of danger, just Hardison yelling. They arrived at Hardison's lab just after Parker, who marched straight in and grabbed Hardison's arm before he could throw one of Emmerich's notebooks at his computer screens. Since she wasn't wearing gloves, she must have known instantly what the fuss was about.

"The data's gone," she told Eliot and Sophie before they could ask. "Everything we'd been working out for the nanobots."

"How?" Sophie asked.

Parker shrugged. "It's possible there was a glitch in the system."

"A glitch? In _my_ system?" Hardison asked.

"It is kind of thrown together," Parker said. "It's the _nicest_ scavenged thrown-together end of the world computer system I've ever seen, but it's still – you know. Not perfect."

"Not _perfect_ means it doesn't have an 80 inch screen and an interactive voice system that sounds like Majel Barrett," Hardison insisted. "It doesn't mean information could get wiped in the middle of the night."

"Apparently it does mean that," Nate said. At some point he had joined up with the rest of them. "Can you salvage it?"

Hardison's shoulders slumped. "I'll get to work on it, man, but this is a step back. And I'm going to have to check the whole damn system, too, so this doesn't happen again – " he kept muttering, more and more quietly, about all the things he had to do. The rest of them drew back to leave him to his work and his lamenting.

"Well, shit," Eliot said. "Not the best news to wake up to."

"Why Eliot," Nate responded drily. "I didn't know you cared. I thought you were indifferent about this project."

"I'm going to have to put up with him moping for days," Eliot said.

He knew he could keep guilt off his face. But however else Nate may have changed, he was still as sharp as ever, which meant he didn't need to see it to know it was there.

Whether he saw it or not, he didn't mention. "I don't think there's much I can do to help, so I'm going to finish my breakfast."

Sophie slipped back into her usual form. "Practical and selfish, I love it. I'll join you."

"Hardison could probably use another pair of hands," Parker said. "Maybe two. Eliot?"

"Sure, why not," Eliot said. "My morning's shot anyway."

They didn't re-enter the lab until after Sophie and Nate had gone, which gave Parker plenty of time to eye Eliot.

"Turn me in or don't," he said. "But don't glare me to death."

"You know he's going to be impossible to live with now," she said.

Eliot winced. He did know.

"I just hope it was worth it," she said.

"Yeah, me too."

-

The next three days were a blur of computer screens, Hardison's grumbling, and the distant view of the outdoors as Eliot passed the windows in the hallway. Spring was arriving, but the three of them were locked inside by obsession and single-mindedness. Hardison had finally given in and accepted that there was no recovering the lost data. That meant, after three supremely thorough checks on the system, having to reconstruct the work of two months as quickly as possible.

It got so tiresome that Eliot thought once or twice about just throwing his hands up and admitting that he'd deleted the data. What stopped him was the thought of Hardison's response. He wasn't normally intimidated by the geek, but this time he made an exception.

There was also the thought of what Nate would have to say about anything, though Eliot was pretty sure Nate knew he's thrown the monkey wrench into the gears. Nate didn't say anything, but he didn't need to. It's what Eliot would have suspected, if he'd been in Nate's shoes.

So he, Parker, and Nate all knew that Eliot had sabotaged their own goal, but they all got together to eat and get status updates from Hardison and pretended like nothing had happened. It was enough to drive a man mad, and it might have continued indefinitely if Sterling had come back.

Eliot figured that Sophie's promise for him to lighten up did not extend to Sterling. "Give up already?" he asked.

"Actually," Sterling said as he sauntered in. "I've met a rather interesting person."

"Don't keep us waiting," Sophie said. "God knows we could use some new faces."

"Not here," Sterling said. "She wouldn't come with me."

"I like her already," Parker grinned.

Sterling scowled. "But she's interested in meeting you all, for whatever reason."

"And why would we want to do that?" Nate asked.

"Good of you to ask. She makes things work."

There was a brief pause. Eliot ground his teeth. He was going to have to say something, wasn't he.

"I'm guessing you don't just mean she's a mechanic."

"Of course not," Sterling said, like _Eliot_ was the one talking stupid. "She fixes things that have no reason to work, just by touching them. Her lights turn on and off despite her house not having any power."

"She could fix Hardison's system," Parker said to Sophie.

Sterling frowned. He'd missed that drama. "Or more to the point, she could fix these nanobots you're all so excited about."

"She could fix the nanobots we're all so excited about," Parker said to Sophie.

"What an idea, Parker, how fascinating," Sophie replied.

"You think it's a good idea to get some strange woman mixed up in this?" Eliot asked. "We don't know anything about her."

"No," Nate said, "But that's an inconvenience, not an obstacle. We can learn about her. And the payoff here would be immense."

That was what Eliot was afraid of.

-

They'd talked endlessly about Sterling's find, once they could drag Hardison away from his screens to come chime in, first in disbelief and then giddy fascination.

"But how does it _work_ ," he kept asked.

"Does it matter, as long as it does?" Sophie wondered.

"If you can't see how it works, there's no guarantee it is working," Nate mused.

That was one of Nate's few contributions to the conversation. If they'd suddenly found a new angle on a con, one that could speed their timetable up and give them a new way in, Nate would have laid out the new plan for them. Now he just listened, his own thoughts indecipherable.

Eliot kept quiet. He already knew what he needed to know.

It still got dark pretty early, so by the time they wrapped up their discussion they decided it was too late to do anything about the woman that night.

What they were planning on doing about her tomorrow was beyond Eliot. Was Nate going to come visit her and talk her into helping them? Because she was sure to be in a rush to trust a man who wouldn't let her see him.

It didn't matter what they were planning. Eliot wasn't going to let it come to that. He waited until everyone had settled down for the night and snuck outside. He could make his way along just fine. Sterling, usually suspicious, told them all how he'd found this woman in the first place. He clearly hadn't thought any of them would go looking for her in the middle of the night.

Eliot stopped to wonder for a second why he was doing this.

But if he'd had any doubts, they vanished when he heard someone behind him.

An honest man didn't worry that people were lying to him.

"You following me, Nate?" He didn't bother turning around.

"You going somewhere, Eliot?"

"Maybe I need some fresh air."

"Fair enough, you have had a stressful few days. Helping Hardison and Parker salvage data. Having to put up with Sterling again, I know you two don't get along so well. And of course destroying Hardison's work."

"You already know that," Eliot said. "You're just wasting time now."

"I am wasting time because I am trying to think why you would do something like that," Nate said. "I never thought you were so petty."

"I'm being petty?" Eliot asked. "Who's been sneaking around for months because it makes him feel important?"

Nate ignored that. "We should have come found you in Boston," he said. "And maybe things would have been better. Maybe. Or maybe Emmerich would have died before we could get any of his research, and there'd be no hope of fixing anything. Is that the idea?"

"I don't have any objections to fixing things," Eliot said. "Except I don't think that's what you're really trying to do. Sophie and Hardison are so convinced this is another stealing-back-from-the-big-bad-guys kind of plan, but I don't buy that. Maybe it's because they never stopped seeing you for who you were before April, and I had to meet you all over again. Maybe it just made me think differently about who you were before April anyway."

"I haven't changed, Eliot." Nate's voice was starting to sound tired. "I have not changed except that all my resources have been taken away, except for me and this team. The odds are worse than ever. This isn't some safe we have to crack. This is the _future_ , Eliot."

"What business have we got breaking into the future?" Eliot said. "That's crazy talk, and I think you know it is, too, or you wouldn't be dancing around what you're saying. You'd come right out and say it."

Nate didn't take the bait.

"What do you really want to do with Emmerich's nanobots, Nate?"

"Now you're wasting time," Nate snapped. "You've figured it out already."

"I was hoping I was wrong," Eliot said. The cold night air was starting to seep into his bones, but the most he could do to warm himself just now was stomp his feet. "Emmerich was mad to turn half the world into freaks. Now you want to finish the job for him?" 

"Better all the world than _half_ the world," Nate said. "There's no undoing what Emmerich did, what all the people affected by him did. And leaving things like this is unsustainable. The only solution is to extend the same chances to everyone."

"You'd really wish that on everyone?" Eliot demanded. "On me, on Hardison, on Maggie? These powers, Nate, they kill people. They drive people crazy. They turn regular people into monsters. And you want to do that to more people? You don't get to make that decision for them."

"Someone has to make a decision!" Nate shouted. Eliot could picture him, ranting and waving his arms like one of the crazier prophets. "Someone has to save these people!"

"And you always know best for everyone else, is that it?"

Suddenly Nate was up in his face, all sound and fury and hot breath. "I know enough not to tear myself apart, which is more than can be said for the rest of the world."

Eliot stood his ground. "And you're going to give them more weapons to tear each other apart, is that it?"

"I'm going," Nate said very deliberately, "to level the playing field."

"This isn't like stopping some corrupt judge or businessman," Eliot started.

"This is exactly like that," Nate said. "This is about everyone getting an equal chance. Who would say no to that?"

"I would. You wouldn't be doing me any favors putting that kind of power on me, with all those delusions and fears. You'd just be making a choice for me. That's not equality and you know it."

"I really did hope that you would agree with me," Nate said. "I can see I was wrong."

Eliot took half a step back, standing more securely. "Are we really going to do this?"

"I can't let you sabotage my plans anymore," Nate said simply.

"And I can't let your plans go forward," Eliot responded in kind. "So it goes."

Nate took a swing at his head, which Eliot easily blocked. If Nate was counting on Eliot's inability to see him, he was mistaken. He didn't _need_ his sight. The real problem would be if Nate had a weapon that Eliot didn't know about. He wouldn't hear that coming the same way he could hear Nate's trying to get around behind him.

At what point had this become about weapons?

Nate scored a solid shot to Eliot's right knee, which is what Eliot got for lapsing into nostalgia _now_ , in the middle of a fight.

He'd had a hell of a lot of practice, the last year, at clearing his mind. He did that now, didn't think about Boston or con men or nanobots. Didn't think about anything except the sound of air moving around another body, the sight of grass bending under feet –

Tunnel vision was the only excuse for missing what happened next.

"What are you _doing_?" someone called out, and a hand descended on Eliot's shoulder.

Eliot struck back, instinctively, and hit Hardison in the face for a second time.

To his credit, Hardison didn't let go of Eliot, but he also got sidetracked from whatever he'd been about to say.

"Nate," Eliot said simply.

"Think he's gone, man," Hardison said. "What got into you? Why're you and Nate fighting?"

"Not now," Eliot said tightly. He could tell Hardison about Nate's real plan _after_ Nate had no chance to put it into action. When it wouldn't matter whose side Hardison was on.

"No, now," Hardison said. "I'm sick of you not trusting me with stuff. Why can't you just tell me what's actually going on?"

"Maybe you're the one who shouldn't trust me," Eliot said. "Maybe there's too much trust here. You want to know? Nate's gone bad and I deleted your stupid data."

Hardison's hand dropped from Eliot's shoulder. "You and I are going to have a very serious talk later," he said. "I thought I just owed you for the two times you've punched me in the face, but this is – this is big league stuff, now. You're going to be paying me back forever."

"Not if we don't catch up with Nate," Eliot said.

This time, he did sense the person sneaking up on him, but thanks to Hardison's expressive face, he knew better than to attack.

Even if it meant he had Parker's whole weight thrown on his back.

"Why?" he asked dully.

"Remember Richmond?" she said. "Invisible woman?"

Her hands dropped over his eyes.

"That wasn't necessary then and it _really_ isn't necessary now," he said.

"Giddy up, pony," she said. "Forward and to the right."

"I can hear you laughing, Hardison," Eliot said. "Keep it up and I'm not going to owe you anything, at least not anything you'll actually want." 

"My kingdom for a camera," Hardison said.

"He's getting away," Parker whispered fiercely.

After all that, it didn't take long for them to catch up with Nate. He hadn't had much of a head start, and Parker was even less dependent on sight now than Eliot.

"Nate," Eliot said. "Come on. Give it a rest already."

"Yeah, Nate," Parker called. "Usually you have good plans but this one kind of sucks."

"No one bats a thousand," Hardison added, despite not knowing what they were talking about. "Maybe we can all get together and workshop this."

"Are you ganging up on me?" Nate's voice responded.

"We're trying to help you," Eliot said.

"You're kind of help is an awful lot like betrayal, Eliot."

"I'm not having this discussion with you while you're invisible," he finally snapped. "Come on out right now or I'm dragging you back."

There was no verbal response. Nate was trying to sneak off, quietly as he could, but between his own hearing and Parker's silent direction – maybe she was helpful, not that he'd tell her, except that she was sure to have heard – there was no way he could be quiet enough.

Eliot thought a quick apology to Nate, but that didn't stop him from lashing out and striking the man down.

As Nate fell to the ground – visible to Eliot's eyes for the first time in a year – Hardison whistled.

"Guess you were holding back when you punched me those times," he said. "Which doesn't mean you don't owe me. And right now you can pay up by explaining why I just helped you KO Nate."

-

Explaining to Hardison was bad enough. The geek had gone quiet and didn't say another word as Eliot carried Nate back to their headquarters.

Explaining to Sterling and Sophie, after Parker raced to fetch them, was even worse. Eliot couldn't make heads or tails of what their expressions meant.

"Do you realize how much some people would pay, to get the same sort of powers Nate or Parker have?" Sterling said finally.

"I bet more of them would rather not have their lives uprooted, again," Eliot growled. "Not to mention the little trend I keep noticing of powers making people go crazy."

"You can't mean Nate," Sophie said. "He's not – he didn't mean anything bad by any of it, I'm sure."

"That's what he said." Eliot shrugged. "It doesn't mean it wouldn't have been a bad thing."

"Of course," Sophie said. "But doing _nothing_..."

"Doing nothing might be the best bet for Nate, for now," Eliot said. "Don't let him spend so much time invisible. And stop him getting so aloof. We could really use him back as his real self again."

Sterling narrowed his eyes. "Why does it sound like you're planning on leaving?"

"Because I am," Eliot said. "Nate shouldn't be doing anything for now. Figured I might as well pick up the slack." He headed for the door, but stopped.

"Sterling – don't bother looking for that woman, the fixing one. I'm going to pay her a little visit, just in case you get tempted into following through with Nate's plan."

"I'd tell you that's unnecessary, but you wouldn't believe me."

"No, I wouldn't," Eliot said shortly. He looked over at Sophie, who looked graver and older than ever, for all that the face she was wearing was her own. "Sophie?"

She nodded at him.

"I'm going to try to lighten up."

She smiled crookedly at him.

"And I'm going to keep my eye on Nate."

He nodded at her in return and left. 

-

He was a half-mile down the road before his shadows caught up with him again.

"How do you move so fast?" Hardison panted. "You got stumpy little short man legs. Shouldn't your steps be, like, three inches big?"

Eliot growled at him.

Parker danced up on the other side, walking backwards so she could look Eliot in the eye. "Now who's sneaking," she asked him.

"I could use some space, after that bad bit of business," he said. "And I'm sure you could use some space from me."

"Please," Parker said. "Your brain is like my home away from home by now."

Eliot couldn't even bother with being creeped out by that. He must be more tired than he thought. 

"I need you to stay with Nate," he said. "Sophie's looking out for him, but there's no telling if he'll get it into his head to play with Emmerich's toys again, and I don't trust Sterling to stop him."

Parker rolled her eyes. "What do you think I was doing while you were whining at Sophie?" she asked, pulling one of Emmerich's notebooks out of her pack. "Nate might be the invisible one, but I'm still the best thief around here."

"Thief nothing, I handed that to you," Hardison pointed out.

"I took Nate's copies!"

"The man was unconscious, that's not exactly hard to steal from an unconscious man."

Eliot shook his head at them and waited for them to stop chattering at each other.

Unfortunately when they did, it was just for Parker to open her eyes wide and ask, "What happens now?"

"How the hell do I know?"

"You beat Nate," she said. "That makes you the new Nate."

Eliot wasn't sure which was worse. "I didn't beat Nate. And I sure as hell don't want to _be_ Nate."

"You knocked him out cold," Hardison said.

Eliot glared at him. "Do you think he was right?" He was pretty sure where Parker fell in all this, but he had to know about Hardison. "Would you have helped if you'd known what he was trying to do?"

Hardison sighed. "I wouldn't have minded getting my own Spidey-sense," he said. "And – he's still Nate, you know. I think he meant right. And I think he was right that somebody's got to do something."

Eliot shook his head. "People take care of themselves. Every big disaster comes along, they bounce back sooner or later. This one might just take a little longer."

"What about people like Court?" Parker demanded. "What about Cooperstown?"

"What, they're all supposed to be my problem now?" Eliot asked.

"No, silly. Our problem."

Eliot thought about that for the next stretch of road. "I guess some people might need a little extra help taking care of themselves," he said.

"And that's what we do," Hardison said, laying a hand over Eliot's shoulders.

Parker swooped around to Eliot's other side and grabbed his arm. "That's what we do."

"I'm going to regret this," Eliot said.

Parker laughed. She knew as clear as he did – as Hardison must have, too – that what he really meant was, _Yeah, that's what we do._


End file.
